


free to fall

by thecatonlyknows



Category: Daredevil (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, Past Sexual Assault, Rape Recovery, Slow Burn, au of jessica jones season 1, canon-typical trauma, coworkers to drinking buddies to reluctant allies to friends to lovers, general kilgrave trigger warning, or like, set in between daredevil season 1 and 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:01:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26678644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecatonlyknows/pseuds/thecatonlyknows
Summary: Jessica Jones has rent to make and the last dregs of her sobriety to drink away. Her traumatized daemon barely talks to her, let alone anyone else, and she's stopped taking Trish's calls - because the last thing she needs right now is a friend.But for some reason, her blind lawyer turned sometime drinking buddy can't seem to get that through his head.[Jessica-centric daemon AU]
Relationships: Jessica Jones/Matt Murdock
Comments: 84
Kudos: 183





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "Ingrate, he had of me  
> All he could have; I made him just and right,  
> Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall."  
> -Paradise Lost
> 
> so my kind of ship is "cynical free spirit with trust issues meets idealistic control freak with a pathological savior complex. together, they massively fuck everything up" and that's pretty much what this is.

The second case Jessica works as a newly-licensed P.I., she’s hired by an accountant with a beagle daemon to spy on his cheating wife, a story so clichéd she has to struggle to stay awake through the end.

The beagle daemon gives Cadmus a cautious stare and a halfhearted wag of her tail as they talk, which Cadmus returns with silence and a hint of bared teeth when she edges an inch too close. The daemon cringes and backs off, suitably cowed, while Jessica offers the thin, rabbity man her hand.

“I’ll call you in a few days with my findings, Mr. Hoyt.” She’s been doing her best impression of a no-nonsense professional, and so far he seems to be buying it, but a part of her is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Laurence Hoyt casts a wary look at Cadmus before reaching out for the shake. The jackal daemon is sitting neatly at her side, watching with narrow yellow eyes as their hands meet. When Hoyt’s fingers wrap around hers he lets out a low, warning growl, and Hoyt flinches and jerks away fast.

“What—“

“I charge fifty percent up front,” Jessica says, deciding her best bet is to just keep bulldozing ahead like she’s got any idea what the hell she’s doing, because what the fuck, it’s worked so far. More or less. She gives Cadmus a sharp nudge in the haunch with her toe, trying to keep the movement discreet, but all that gets her is a yellow glare of her own as his head swings her way, growl deepening in the back of his throat. “I trust that’s not going to be a problem?”

“Uh—“ Hoyt’s eyes are darting back and forth between Jessica and her daemon so fast she’s pretty sure the man’s going to give himself a concussion. “No—“ Cadmus’s growl deepens, and Hoyt’s voice breaks off as his beagle daemon whines and brushes up against his legs.

“Knock it off, Cadmus,” Jessica adds for good measure, shooting the jackal a hard glare right back. If he costs her one of their very first clients, he’s going to be sleeping on the floor for a week. “Sorry about him, he skipped his kibble this morning.”

Hoyt coughs, visibly collecting himself, and crosses his arms with a harried frown. “Fifty percent is, that’s fine,” he manages to get out. “Just—as long as you get me those photographs, that’s all I want.” He keeps his eyes fixed on Jessica as he speaks, very deliberately not looking down at the tense jackal by her side.

“Will do.” She tries to fill her voice with all the brazen confidence she absolutely does not feel, and what do you know, it seems to do the trick. Laurence Hoyt is out the door of her crummy new office a minute later, beagle daemon scuttling close on his heels.

“What the hell, Cadmus,” she snaps, as soon as the door is safely shut and locked behind her. “You know we need this case to pay the rent, right?” Crummy as this new place might be, there’s still no such thing as a cheap New Amsterdam apartment, and Jessica’s savings are what you could charitably call nonexistent at this point. Living rent-free at Trish’s place might have been driving her slowly and excruciatingly insane, but it definitely had some financial perks.

Cadmus just stays where he is, sitting upright in front of her desk with his sharp, foxlike ears pricked up and his sharper yellow eyes fixed on her. About as big a medium-sized dog, her daemon has sooty, golden-brown fur, frosted black at the tips along his back and tail. His face is pointed and wolfish enough that people sometimes mistake him for a coyote at first glance—coyote daemons, after all, are a lot more common here in their native North Columbia than golden jackals. Jessica read somewhere that people who had trouble feeling like they belonged to their communities were more likely to have daemons who settled into the shapes of animals that were foreign to their birthplace. Most of that daemon-psychoanalysis stuff is obvious bullshit, but every now and then, Jessica has to admit, you could stumble onto something that might have at least half a point.

“Well?” She raises an eyebrow at him, then for good measure crosses her arms. Finally she starts to tap her foot in a slow, obnoxious pattern that she knows puts Cadmus’s teeth on edge.

But Cadmus just bares a fang at her, unimpressed, and doesn’t answer.

Jessica isn’t really expecting him to. Cadmus hasn’t said a word for months. Not to her or to Trish or even Trish’s Bassanio, back when Jessica was still talking to them, holed up on Trish’s couch with a scream buried in her throat and bottle of jack clutched in either hand—not to anyone. Not since that night when the two of them ran, blood on her hands and in his fur, Kilgrave’s last command still searing the inside of her head like wildfire— _come back here, Jessica_ —

“Shit,” she says, and scrubs a hand over her eyes. “Fuck.” And then, when that doesn’t work, she says it again, more loudly. “Fuck.”

But it doesn’t help. She can still hear him, his voice wrapped like a vice around her name, _Jessica_ —and she can smell him, too, his clean hot breath and his favorite cologne, that smooth, smoky-plum scent that makes her stomach churn and her hands sweat, even now— _come back here, Jessica_ —

A sharp flare of pain in her wrist brings her back to herself.

Jessica breaths out, slowly, and forces open her eyes. Cadmus is standing beside her with his teeth sinking into her arm. Warm red blood trickles down her palm, dripping onto the bare wooden floor as he bites down harder. Jessica sucks in a deep breath of air and lets the pain ground her.

She’s in her own apartment. It smells like mold and dust and chipped paint, not $600 men’s fragrance. There’s no one else here. It’s just her and Cadmus, his teeth in her flesh and his eyes on her face, dragging her back to reality one jagged, bleeding inch at a time. Kilgrave is gone. Kilgrave is _dead_ —and he isn’t coming back, he isn’t—he can’t—

“Main Street,” she grits out, and reaches out with her free hand to bury it in the thick ruff of fur at Cadmus’s neck. “Birch Street.” She winces as Cadmus’s teeth dig in deeper, but doesn’t let go of his ruff, just tightens her fingers and hangs on like someone drowning. “Fuck. Hig—Higgins Drive.” Slumping down onto the floor beside Cadmus, she leans forward to rest her face against his furry side. “Higgins Drive.”

Eventually, Cadmus releases her wrist. Jessica lets her hand drop to her side without moving from her place on the floor. “Cobalt Lane,” she keeps muttering into the warmth of his body, breathing in raggedly and ignoring the way the fresh wound stings. “Main Street, Birch Street. H-Hig—“

“Higgins Drive,” Cadmus says hoarsely, and Jessica stills. His voice is low and rough with disuse, and she can feel him trembling. “Cobalt Lane.” Then he stops, faltering.

“Main Street,” Jessica rasps, after a long, stunned pause, picking up where her daemon trailed off. “Birch Street.”

Cadmus’s heart is beating fast against her ear. “Higgins Drive.”

They go through the list together, street by street. Eventually Cadmus stops shaking, and Jessica’s breathing evens out. After a while they both fall silent. Then Cadmus leans down to swipe his rough tongue across her wrist, licking the blood clean.

“So you do remember how to talk. I was starting to wonder.”

Cadmus just grunts. “No, you weren’t.”

Jessica rolls her eyes, but she’s too tired—and too stupidly relieved at the familiar timbre of her daemon’s voice—to make a thing of it. “No, I wasn’t,” she says instead, and gets up to wash her wrist clean of blood and jackal drool in the bathroom. If her eyes are damp and her chest feels a little lighter than it had just this morning, well, that’s her own business, and Cadmus can butt right out.

From the other room, Cadmus snorts at her. Jessica almost doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror when her lips curl up in something close to a grin at the sound.

* * *

  
Over the next few weeks, Jessica takes on nine more clients and snaps photographs of six more cheating couples in variously unappealing stages of coitus and / or undress. Cadmus growls at four of them, almost takes a bite out of one woman’s handsy macaque daemon, and leaves three new sets of matching teeth marks on Jessica’s arm when she needs to get snapped out of what Trish’s quack therapist referred to as acute PTSD-triggered panic attacks and Jessica prefers to think of as shitty mementos from a shitty prick, rot in hell asshole, he’s dead and I’m not a.k.a. I win, the end.

Yeah, if only, Jessica thinks sourly, and takes a deep swallow of jack.

Trish calls once, and Jessica doesn’t answer. She misses her and Bassanio like a black hole in her chest, but the idea of actually talking to either of them fills her with nausea. Jessica and Cadmus moved out for a reason; eventually, Trish will realize that. Right now, she can’t take any more of Trish’s soft eyes or careful touches or that awful fucking _heartbreak_ that keeps stealing across her foster sister’s face when she thinks Jessica isn’t looking, like Jessica’s some broken childhood doll Trish knows she’ll never fix but still can’t bring herself to throw away. It makes her want to throw up.

Besides, Jessica doesn’t need anyone elses’s heartbreak on her shoulders these days. She’s got enough of her own to carry around.

Cadmus talks to her two more times. It’s not as much as she’d like but still a hell of a lot more than the stony silence he’d been maintaining for the seven months previous, so Jessica will take it.

All in all, Alias Investigations is doing a lot better than she’d dared to hope when she first decided to take the plunge and set up shop for herself. She’s getting complaints, yeah, but she’s also getting results, and apparently the latter counts for more than the former, or at least it counts for enough to keep the new clients coming in, which is all Jessica cares about. And Cadmus seems to like the work too—he’s less jumpy when they have a case to keep their minds focused, calmer and more alert when he’s tracking a good scent-trail or hopping up on a window ledge behind her, despite the sleaze and low-stakes drudgery the P.I. business turns out to mainly entail. It’s not like either of them expected much else.

It’s just past noon and she’s halfway through the bottle she’d opened that morning when the phone rings, making Jessica twitch and cough and Cadmus jolt to his feet from where he’d been lazily sprawled on the floor by her chair.

Then, as the phone continues to ring, they both take a short, slightly embarrassed moment to compose themselves, trading equally irritated glances as Cadmus huffs and slumps back to the floor and Jessica drags a hand through her hair, scowling as she knocks back another mouthful. “Yeah, yeah,” she mutters at the phone, swallowing hard against the burn in her throat before shoving it up against her ear. “Hello?”

“Hello,” a chipper male voice pipes out at her. “Am I speaking to Jessica Jones, of Alias Investigations?”

“Yeah,” she says flatly. “Who’s asking?”

“My name is Franklin Nelson, attorney at law. I was referred to you by a contact at Hogarth, Chao and Benowitz?”

The voice pauses, as if expecting Jessica to say something in response, so she scrapes up her driest, “Okay,” and waits for the rest of it.

“I understand you’re taking on new clients?”

“That’s right,” she says, already tapping her fingers on her desktop and biting back an impatient retort. Get to the point, legal eagle, she doesn’t have all day.

“Great,” the guy says, way too brightly. “The firm of Nelson and Murdock would like to talk to you about a case. Can you come in?”

The Sunday school cheeriness of his tone has got Jessica’s hackles all the way up, but, like she keeps telling Cadmus, rent isn’t going to make itself, and as a shiny new P.I. with that new-car smell still lingering in the air around her, Jessica isn’t exactly in a place to be turning down well-paying clients. And if Hogarth was any example, law firms are where the money’s at.

“Sure,” she says, after letting the pause stretch out just long enough to be awkward. “What’s the address?”

After she writes it down and finishes haggling out the details with the lawyer—“Call me Foggy,” he’d said ludicrously, which she is absolutely not going to do—Jessica looks down at Cadmus, who’s already looking up to meet her eyes.

“Well, feel like stretching your legs?”

She watches him think about it. “Alright,” he says at last, and something in her heart twists again at the sound, though she’s careful not to let it show on her face. Cadmus can read her anyway, of course—he always can—but he lets it pass with nothing but a snort and a rough headbutt in the thigh to get her moving.

Nelson and Murdock’s office turns out to be no glittering Hogarth, Chao and Benowitz high rise, that’s for sure. In fact, it’s almost small enough to remind Jessica of her own place. Not quite all the way there—it’s significantly cleaner and missing the cockroaches and a certain eau de whiskey and sleepless desperation, yeah, but even so, it’s not exactly what she’d pictured from the educated voice of the boyscout on the other end of the phone. She’d done a little digging before setting out, and learned that Nelson and Murdock was a young firm—still got that new-car smell, just like her—and run by a couple do-gooder types, from what she could find. Most of their cases so far had been pro bono, which explains the size of the office, if not the fact that Nelson had agreed to her jacked-up lawyer rates without nothing but a few sniffles. But maybe they were shit at their jobs and more desperate than they smelled.

Cadmus doesn’t seem to like the place much, from the way he brushes up against her legs as they walk, keeping her close—but then again, Cadmus doesn’t really like anyplace new these days. Jessica’s pretty sure he only barely tolerates their apartment, and they’ve been living there for months now.

“I’m looking for Nelson,” she tells the pretty blonde secretary who glances up at her with a polite smile at the front desk. She has a little rainbow-colored lovebird daemon perched daintily on her shoulder who greets Cadmus with an equally polite trill, which Cadmus ignores.

“Of course,” the woman says, still smiling. “And do you have an appointment, Ms…?”

“Just tell him Jones is here.”

“Hey, Karen,” someone calls from the other room, and then a round-faced man in a suit with shaggy brown hair pops into view from around the corner. “Did you get that—oh, hi.”

“Foggy, this is Ms. Jones…?”

“Great, you made it.” The lawyer shoots her yet another polite smile—Jessica is starting to feel a little claustrophobic at all the good manners getting sent her way, she seriously might break out in hives if this keeps up—and waves her over. “Thanks for coming in at such short notice.”

“No problem,” Jessica drawls, stretching out the words like a bubblegum bubble. “So long as you've actually got a case for me. I didn’t walk over here for the exercise.”

The lawyer doesn’t look put out by her tone, which is the first mark in his favor since he called her ma’am on the phone an hour or so ago. He just keeps smiling pleasantly, waiting for her to follow him into his office. So after a moment, Jessica does.

Nelson’s daemon, a white and brown border collie, wags her tail at Cadmus as they pass. “Hello,” she says, ears pricked up as she trots a few steps toward him. “I’m Imogen.”

Cadmus scans her up and down and doesn’t answer. Jessica keeps half an eye on the interaction, but the other daemon doesn’t push, just waves her tail back and forth a few more times like a flag of surrender and lets it drop when Cadmus keeps quiet. If only everyone’s daemon had the good sense to back off when they clearly aren’t wanted, it would save Jessica a hell of a lot of headaches.

“My partner and I are trying to track down a missing witness,” Nelson says as they stepped into the next room. “Matt—this is Jessica Jones, that P.I. I mentioned. Ms. Jones, this is my partner, Matthew Murdock.”

The man seated at the table lifts his head as Jessica strides inside. He’s just as pasty-pale as Nelson, but considerably more fit, and Jessica can make out the definite hint of muscles underneath the folds of his cheap suit. He’s got brown hair and stubble and the kind of schoolboy good looks that makes Jessica instantly wary, but—if the dark glasses and cane are anything to go by—he’s also blind. Huh.

“Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Jones.” The blind man’s daemon, a dark red snake loosely coiled around his neck and shoulders, lifts her head to watch them enter, tongue flicking out to taste the new scents on air.

“Hi.” Jessica crosses her arms over her chest, feeling defensive for a reason she can’t quite name. “So who’s the witness?”

“Jacinta Garcias,” Murdock says crisply, sliding a file across the table. “We need her to testify in a custody case, but she’s a hard woman to find.”

Jessica picks up the file and flips it open, scanning the first page inside. “Nanny, huh? What’d she do, sleep with the husband?”

Nelson laughs at that, a little awkwardly, but Murdock’s expression stays meek as milk and just as mild. “Not as far as we know. But we believe she was witness to a number of…violent altercations between the married couple. Now they’re getting a divorce, and, well…”

“Yeah, I can keep up.” Jessica shares a glance with Cadmus, who has come to sit at her side, motionless but for the restless flicking of his tail against the floor. His eyes keep drifting to Murdock’s daemon where she rests across his shoulders, and he’s leaning forward slightly the way he does when he’s caught an interesting scent. Jessica wonders idly what species of snake she is, with that striking color variant—she’s about the right size for a king snake, or a corn snake, maybe, Jessica’s pretty sure those are native to the area. Hard to tell from this distance, but she’s not curious enough to come closer. “So who’s your client? Husband or wife?”

“The husband,” Nelson says, “But the child’s welfare is our priority." Bizarrely enough, Jessica almost believes him. As a general rule she trusts lawyers a lot less far than she can throw them, but something about Nelson's earnest good cheer and his daemon's wagging tail strikes her as sincere. At any rate these two are no Jeri Hogarth, that's for damn sure. Mostly because Hogarth would eat them both alive with one bite, yeah, but still. "So we’ve got more than one reason for wanting to interview Ms. Garcias first.”

Jessica weighs the file in her hands, thinking it over. “Which one do you like for the spouse-beating?” It could always be both, of course, but that isn’t the sense she’s getting here.

“The wife,” Murdock cuts in. “But like Foggy said, we want to make sure we've dotted all our i's with this one.”

“Sure, whatever.” Tucking the file under her arm, Jessica reaches down to scritch behind Cadmus’s ear. “I’ll find Garcias for you. Standard rates. Half up front, half on delivery. That work for you?”

“That’ll do it, Ms. Jones,” Nelson says, sticking out his hand. After eyeing it dubiously for a second, Jessica takes it, giving a quick squeeze before releasing him just as fast. Cadmus watches them carefully, but either he’s in a good mood today or Nelson doesn’t grate on him the way most of her clients do, because for once he doesn’t seem to fighting back the urge to start howling at the sight.

“Foggy says he’s heard good things,” Murdock adds. His snake daemon lifts her head as he speaks, swaying as she surveys the room in a lazy, back-and-forth motion that Jessica finds weirdly hypnotic. “But we’re running short on time. For the child’s sake, I hope you work fast, Ms. Jones. And that your work is worth the rate you’re charging.”

Oddly enough, it’s the subtle bite underneath the mild-mannered words that relaxes Jessica more than anything else. Passive-aggressive assholes who think the world spins around their sense of entitlement, she knows how to deal with. It’s just Nelson’s creepily sincere pleasantries that throw her off balance. “Guess I’d better bump that guy who asked me to cure cancer further down the queue, then, I wouldn’t want to get my priorities mixed up.”

Murdock’s head tips to one side, looking faintly dismayed. The gesture’s comically similar to his daemon’s, enough that Jessica has to bite back a snort on seeing it. “Ms. Jones, I didn’t mean—“

“I’ll get in touch when I’ve got an address.” Cadmus takes a moment to follow even after Jessica has turned to go, though he gives no sign of noticing when Nelson’s daemon wishes him a good afternoon. The blonde woman waves after them as Jessica and Cadmus step outside.

“Jesus,” Jessica says as the fresh air finally hits her, flipping up her collar and shooting a wary glance backwards at the doors closing behind them. “What a Stepford freakshow. If that’s what do-gooder lawyers are like, I think I prefer the Hogarths of the world.” At least Hogarth was an honest shark, Jessica could give the woman that much.

“That lawyer, Murdock,” Cadmus says slowly. “He smelled strange.”

“Oh yeah?” Jessica tries to keep her voice casual, even though this is the most Cadmus has said to her all week. Christ, even in her head that sounds pathetic. “Strange how?”

“Like…blood.”

Yeah, for your average New Amsterdam lawyer, that is strange. “I take it you’re not speaking metaphorically.” Cadmus just huffs, not bothering to dignify that with an answer. “What, you think he stopped off to murder a hobo before coming in to work today?” Jessica wouldn’t put something like that past Hogarth, but she’s not sure if she’d peg the blind man as a likely suspect. Maybe if it was a really slow hobo.

“No, not someone else’s blood. His own.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

Jessica chews that one over. “Recent operation, maybe? Or a fall down the stairs?” She guesses that might be a higher than average risk for someone who literally couldn’t see the steps in front of his nose.

“Maybe.”

She studies the jackal loping at her side as they cross the street and take a left onto the next sidewalk, dodging pedestrians on the way. “I noticed you staring at his snake daemon while we were there. Anything weird about her?”

But Cadmus has apparently decided he’s spoken enough for one day, because he doesn’t answer. So Jessica sighs and walks on in silence, letting it go.

According to all the books she’s ever read and all the television she’s ever watched, there are a lot of people out there in the world who tell their daemons everything, and vice versa. Sometimes Jessica wonders what that’s like.

Things used to be better between her and Cadmus, back before Kilgrave and his Laelaps and the godawful mess those psychos left of them both. But even when Jessica was younger, they’d never had the easy camaraderie that Trish and Bassanio always seemed to share. Jessica has gotten used to envying that a little. She’s also used to the fact that Cadmus is never going to tell her everything going on in his head, no more than she’s ever going to tell him what’s in hers. But once in while, she just wishes that he would tell her _something_.

* * *

Jacinta Garcias proves trickier to track down than she’d expected. Either the nanny had a second career in espionage or she's got friends in low places who know how to make someone disappear.

Either way, Jessica isn’t about to let it drop. That holier-than-thou lawyer duo can kiss her ass if they think she'd give up on a case so easily.

After another fruitless hour, Jessica closes her laptop and pushes herself to her feet, wincing as she stretches out her neck and hears it crack. Then, after checking to make the sure front door is safely locked—this would be a bad time for her junkie neighbor to stumble over unannounced—she crosses over to her bedroom, shoves the dresser one-handed away from the wall, and kneels to pull up the loose floorboard underneath. She grabs the little drawstring bag lying there, then moves to sit leaning against the wall besides it, spreading her knees to hold the bag in between them.

Cadmus pads over to watch while she’s undoing the knots and pulling the heavy gold object out. It looks a little like a compass, or maybe an astrolabe, but too big, filling the palm of her hand as she flips open the lid and starts to fiddle with the knobs around the edges.

An alethiometer, Kilgrave had called it, when he handed it to her for the first time. One of only seven ever made. _It tells you the truth, Jessica, if you know how to read it._ But Kilgrave himself didn’t know how, because hardly anyone did.

He meant to impress her with a fancy trinket, nothing more, but his interest had sharpened considerably when Jessica, after spending a fascinated ten minutes examining the thing, somehow managed to produce—and then explain, reasonably coherently—a response. After that, he started testing her abilities, ordering her to read it more and more frequently. Jessica still didn’t fully understand why he’d seemed so invested in helping her practice with the thing. Kilgrave didn’t have much use for the truth in any other area of his life, and it wasn’t like he needed help when it came to making money or influencing people. She’d finally concluded that it was the rarity of the thing, and of her knack for reading, that he liked—it fed his ego, the same way controlling another powered person like Jessica did.

She spares a moment to sincerely hope that he and his ego are both enjoying themselves while burning in hell, then, with a effort of will, shoves the prick from her mind. The alethiometer is hers now. That’s all that matters from before.

“You ready?” she asks Cadmus before setting the question, and Cadmus nods quietly from where he’s seated beside her, pressed up against her side to look down at the golden device in her hands.

In the past few months, Jessica has done some digging into the history of alethiometers on her own. There’s not a lot out there, but she’s managed to scrounge up a little bit about their inventor, some 17th century theologian from Prague, as well as a few tattered reference books of dubious authenticity to pad her knowledge about the thirty-six symbols on its face, which she’s spent more than one sleepless night flipping through. According to one even more dubious source, there’s historically been a couple different approaches to asking a question. There’s the classical way, by setting the three hands of the alethiometer to three different symbols, which supposedly produces a more precise and thorough reply, if you know how to interpret it. And then there’s Jessica’s way, the “unorthodox approach,” the book had called it—where you spin all three hands to a single symbol and then do the mental equivalent of jumping into the roller coaster and holding on for your life.

She tried the, quote, “classical method” a few times after reading about it, but it never seemed to work for her that well—she’d get some hazy impressions, maybe one or two solid ideas, and then spend hours cursing and leafing through her reference books for clues. The advantage to it was that it didn't make her violently sick after trying it. The disadvantage was that the more complicated the question, the harder interpreting the answer became. The unorthodox way had its downsides, but so far it was still a lot more effective.

Anyway, Jessica’s always been an unorthodox kind of woman.

She takes a moment to let the jumbled swirl of her thoughts quiet as she looks down at the smooth glass face of the alethiometer. There’s a special kind of place a reading takes her to, calm and still the way her mind never is at any other time. Beside her she can hear Cadmus’s steady breathing.

Where is Jacinta Garcias? she thinks, and, after a moment’s patient contemplation, sets all three hands to the symbol of the walled garden. Lost innocence seems appropriate for this particular child custody case.

She watches as the dark arrow hand starts to spin, faster and faster and then slow. Finally it comes to a stop on four symbols: first the apple, then the wild man, the horse, and at last the anchor. For a while Jessica just sits there breathing in and out and letting the symbols sink into her thoughts like a stone falling through water.

In the walled garden, the apple had to stand for sin. The wild man suggested something sexual about it. Sounded like Ms. Garcias was living in sin with a loverboy somewhere. The horse could mean travel, but the anchor told Jessica she couldn’t have gone too far…somewhere foreign but close by, still in the city…

Eventually Cadmus rouses her with a nip to her knee.

“Ow,” Jessica says, rubbing it irritably. But she starts to move anyway, shoving the alethiometer back into its bag and hiding it underneath the floorboard. She’s just pushing the dresser back in place when the first wave of dizziness crashes over her. The cramps hit her stomach next, and she barely makes it to the toilet in time before she’s started heaving up this morning’s breakfast of cold pizza and whiskey into the porcelain bowl.

“Shit,” she breathes out, leaning all her weight against the toilet seat as her stomach continues to churn in violent complaint. “Remind me why I took this case again.”

“A blind guy doubted your P.I. prowess and you decided you had something to prove,” Cadmus grits out unsympathetically from where he’s curled up on the bathroom floor next to her, wracked by similar spasms.

Sounds about right. Jesus, Jessica has to work on being less easily goaded. This is absolutely not worth the expression on some asshole’s face when she proves him wrong by bringing in the address a day sooner than she’d promised.

After a half hour or so, the cramps begin to pass, and Jessica and Cadmus finally stagger out of the bathroom. She rinses her mouth out with a swallow of whiskey before collapsing into the chair at her desk and flipping open her laptop. Using the alethiometer always made them sick like this. It sucked, but they were both at least pretty used to it by now, and Jessica knew the last of the cramps would pass soon.

“So what did you get?” Cadmus asks, jumping up on top of the desk so he can peer down at the computer screen in front of her.

“I’m pretty sure she’s holed up with a boyfriend.” Jessica starts typing as she talks, her mind flipping automatically through the possibilties. “Somewhere in the city, by the docks, maybe, or an immigrant neighborhood…”

Four hours, three phone calls, and one trip to Chinatown later, Jessica has the address. She takes a certain pleasure in ringing up Nelson to rattle it off for him.

But Murdock picks up instead, and there’s another kind of pleasure in the surprise in his voice when she gives him the information. Jessica can feel her lips curling up in a smirk that makes Cadmus glance at her and roll his eyes. She just rolls hers back at him.

“Thank you, Ms. Jones,” Murdock says, sickeningly genuine. Ugh, Jessica hadn’t signed up for that part. “I mean it. If we can persuade Ms. Garcias to testify by the end of the week—“

“Yeah yeah, I get it, you’re going to save the kid’s life on the way to rescuing a bag of kittens from a burning building or whatever. I don’t care how you get your kicks, Murdock, just put the check in the mail.”

“Of course.”

Jessica hesitates for a second, then sighs forcefully through her nose, already annoyed at herself for what she’s going to say next. “Look, about my fee—“

“I have to emphasize that Nelson and Murdock is a new firm, Ms. Jones. We’re grateful for your efficiency in tracking down Ms. Garcias, but I’m afraid we can’t afford to go any higher than what you’re already charging.”

“I gave you the jacked-up rates I charge Hogarth’s firm for being a bunch of soulless rich assholes,” Jessica cuts in, talking fast to get it over with. “If Nelson and Murdock agree to call me up the next time you’re looking for some P.I. work, I’ll lower my current fee by fifteen percent. Deal?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. When Murdock speaks again, he sounds both taken aback and pleased, in a way that would no doubt make her want to slug him if he was standing in front of her now. “I think we can agree to that. You’ve got yourself a deal, Ms. Jones. Thank you.”

“Whatever.” She hangs up on him. “Shut up,” she tells Cadmus, who’s watching her with a distinctly amused cant of his head. “It’s the smart play. I’ll make more off them in the long term if they keep coming to me for their cases. Obviously they couldn’t afford me otherwise.”

“Sure,” Cadmus says. “Let me know when you want to go looking for a kitten to rescue from a burning building.”

“I liked you better when you didn’t talk.”

“No, you didn’t,” he says serenely. Jessica tries to scowl at him, but her heart’s not really in it.


	2. Chapter 2

Jessica’s life settles into a pattern. She sleeps badly, starts drinking before noon, and does the bulk of her business in cheating spouses, spending her nights climbing ledges and shivering on rooftops to take pictures of crappy people having crappy sex in a variety of crappy motel rooms and cockroach-riddled apartments. Anything Hogarth throws her way generally comes as a welcome change, if only because everyone involved tends to keep their clothes on. Once in a while, Nelson and Murdock will give her a call, and then Jessica will find herself tracking down witnesses or digging up evidence for whatever their latest bleeding-heart cause turns out to be. She doesn’t come across anything tricky enough that she needs to pull out the alethiometer to crack, which is for the best—she always gets sicker if she tries to answer too many questions close together.   
  
Cadmus is talking to her more, though he still clams up whenever anyone else is in the room. But Jessica doesn’t care much about that—it’s not like she’s all that big on company these days as it is. The closest she comes to socializing in the four months since she stopped talking to Trish is the day Nelson invites her to grab a drink with him and Murdock after she swings by late one evening to drop off a flashdrive.   
  
“You should come,” Nelson says as he throws on his jacket. The lights in the office are already dimmed, and they’re clearly shutting up shop for the day. “Matt’s buying. And Karen’s coming, aren’t you, Karen?”  
  
“One beer, Foggy,” the secretary says threateningly, holding up a single finger for emphasis. “Don’t you dare let me drink the eel again, I was sick for a week.”  
  
“Eel?” Jessica asks, raising a brow in spite of herself.   
  
Karen flashes her a quick, conspiratorial smile. “Don’t ask.” Her lovebird daemon Elephenor has perched on top of Imogen’s furry head where the two of them wait by the door, which Nelson’s daemon looks perfectly happy about, her eyes slightly crossing as she tries to look up at the bird preening himself behind her left ear.   
  
“We’re just headed to Josie’s down the street.” Jessica suppresses a flinch as Murdock walks up behind her. No blind man should be able to move as quietly as he does, but somehow this isn’t the first time she’s failed to hear him coming. His tie is askew, and Philomena lies in her usual loose red coils around his neck as she whispers something Jessica can’t quite make out into his ear. Directions across the room, maybe—having a daemon who can see has to help a lot with the whole blind thing. That’s probably why he doesn’t stumble into things nearly as much as he should.  
  
“And you’re buying, huh?”  
  
“Why?” He smiles slightly, all choirboy charm. But Jessica doesn’t buy it for a second, not on a lawyer as sharp as Murdock has turned out to be. “Are you drinking?”

After taking on a couple more cases with Nelson and Murdock, Jessica feels like she has a pretty good read on Franklin Nelson and the secretary, Karen Page. They’re no pushovers, but there’s something fundamentally sweet-natured to both of them, something that reminds her vaguely of her junkie neighbor Malcolm and his Lavinia, and their gentle, shambling walk back to his apartment door. Nothing at all like Jeri Hogarth and her team of bloodsuckers, that’s for certain.

But Matthew Murdock is a different matter entirely, and Jessica still isn’t quite sure what to make of him. He’s got the wide-eyed idealist act down pat, she’ll give him that, but every now and then she catches a glimpse of something else underneath, covert and bitter and razor-sharp. It throws her off each time. And then there’s the way Cadmus keeps smelling blood on him. Neither of them is sure why, but Jessica is sure that she doesn’t like it. As for Murdock himself—well, she’s still deciding.  
  
Jessica crosses her arms and trades a glance with Cadmus, but her daemon isn’t giving any hint as to his own feelings. Going with is obviously a bad idea: she barely knows these people, for one thing, and what she does know is sickeningly virtuous enough to turn a priest’s stomach, for another. Either they’re the real deal, in which case they’ll want nothing to do with her as soon as they figure out how genuinely shitty Jessica is as a person—or they’re not, in which case they’re all good enough liars to give her serious heebie-jeebies for years to come. Either way, she’s clearly better off steering clear.   
  
Which is probably why she finds herself opening her mouth to say, “Sure, why not.” Socializing may not be Jessica’s thing, but self-sabotage has always been right up her alley.   
  
Murdock looks a little surprised at her answer, but Nelson just grins and lets out a whoop as he flings open the door.   
  
The cold night air hits like a slap to the face as they step outside onto the dark street. Jessica drops back to let the others walk ahead of her and Cadmus, shoving her hands into her pockets to ward off the chill as she studies their silhouettes against the streetlight. Karen has her arm hooked through Murdock’s, Nelson on the man’s other side with his head thrown back in a laugh. Imogen gambols cheerfully next to him, wagging her tail nonstop as she talks animatedly to Elephenor, who’s still sitting comfortably on top of the dog daemon’s head.   
  
It’s pretty disgusting, all told—like looking at a Hallmark gift card. Jessica already regrets tagging along. No amount of free booze is worth this shit. 

She takes a drink from her hip flash and scowls, wondering if she should just turn back now. She doesn’t know what she was thinking, imagining she could play pretend at normalcy for a night. Jessica’s a superpowered freakshow with a bad attitude and a conga line of trauma a mile long. She doesn’t belong out here with people like this, nice, normal citizens with nice, normal daemons, the kind of people who go out for friendly drinks with their coworkers and can fall asleep without downing two bottles of whiskey to quiet the screams in their head beforehand.   
  
Cadmus seems to pick up on her growing tension, because his ears start to tip backwards as they walk, and his gait becomes less of a relaxed lope than a low, slinking prowl, until he looks more like he’s stalking the three people in front of them than following at their invitation.   
  
By the time they reach the dive bar they’re both strung tight, and Jessica knows it won’t take much to set either of them off.   
  
As it turns out, they don’t even make it inside the bar. A man stumbles out the door just as Nelson reaches to pull it open. Jessica jumps back in time to avoid the enormous wild boar daemon that comes out after him, but Cadmus isn’t quite fast enough, and the boar’s damp nostrils brush up against his leg.   
  
Cadmus’s reaction is instantaneous. He steps in front of Jessica with his teeth bared, and a low, guttural growl ripples from his throat out across the street, making people jump and skitter warily away. “Cadmus,” Jessica snaps, but he ignores her. “Cadmus, knock it off!”  
  
The drunken boar daemon doesn’t seem to realize what the problem is, because it just staggers another foot closer, sniffling curiously. Cadmus’s snarl gets louder. His ears are lying flat along his skull, his shoulders hunched and his eyes gleaming, every inch of his posture a warning. It should have looked absurd, a mid-sized jackal prepared to pounce on a daemon twice as big as him, but Jessica knows better than to underestimate Cadmus’s strength—or his aggression. He gets them both from her, after all.  
  
The drunken man the boar daemon belongs to comes to a stop, giving Jessica a blearily unfriendly look. “Fuck is this? Quitaria?” The boar shrugs unsteadily. “Hey, call off your dog, bitch.”  
  
Jessica straightens as Cadmus’s growl becomes rougher and more deadly, all thoughts of deescalation leaving her head. “What did you say to me, asshole?”   
  
“Whoa, whoa.” Then Murdock somehow inserts himself in between them, hands spread. It’s the first time Jessica has seen him without his daemon curled around his neck. She’s slithered to the ground to speak softly to the boar daemon, insinuating herself in front of Cadmus just as Murdock has managed to place himself in front of Jessica. “No need to ruin anybody’s night here. Right, Ms. Jones?”  
  
“Why don’t you get the fuck out of my way and mind your own business, Murdock?” Jessica’s hands are bunched into fists at her sides, and she’s all geared up and ready for a fight, her blood pounding.   
  
But now Nelson is coming around to put a hand on the drunk’s shoulder, talking him down, and Murdock isn’t moving from his spot.  
  
“Come on, Ms. Jones,” he says easily, holding out his hand. Behind him the drunk curses and shoves Nelson off, shooting her a dark look before striding unsteadily away down the street. “Let’s get you that drink.”  
  
Cadmus’s growl starts to trail off as the boar gives a clumsy shake of its ugly head and turns to follow. People are staring, Jessica realizes. Karen looks startled, Nelson cautious, and their daemons have both inched away from Cadmus where he stands beside her, ears still flat and lips wrinkled up to show off his sharp white teeth. Murdock’s daemon is neatly coiled a few feet away, watching him quietly.   
  
“Are you alright?” she asks. Jessica can’t remember if she’s ever heard Philomena speak before. Her voice is low and calm, with the hint of a rasp wrapped around the edges, like the crinkle of tinfoil around chocolate.  
  
Cadmus’s eyes flick to hers, and he stares at her for a moment before jerking his head away, scratching a paw against Jessica’s leg as he does. 

“Yeah, okay,” Jessica tells him, because they’re definitely on the same page now. Adrenaline is still coursing through her veins, and she can feel the panic starting to set in where the anger used to be, making her fingers tremble and her stomach twist with the aftermath. The idea of setting foot inside a crowded room is absurdly unappealing. She’d rather wrestle a shark without scuba gear than spend another minute around other people, feeling her flesh crawl and her organs try to fight their way out of her skin.  
  
“Ms. Jones?”  
  
Ignoring the oustretched hand, Jessica gives her head a shake to clear it. “Some other time, Murdock.” Jamming her own hands back into her pockets, she turns to go. “I just remembered I’ve got booze at home.”  
  
“Oh, Jessica, you’re not leaving?” Karen sounds genuinely sorry at the idea, which just makes Jessica more desperate than ever to get out of here.   
  
“See you around,” she says, instead of dragging it out, and gives the three of them a half-hearted wave over her shoulder as she and Cadmus start off down the sidewalk.   
  
She glances aside at Cadmus a few minutes later, once they’ve safely rounded the corner and are out of sight and earshot. “Hey. You okay?”  
  
“I’m fine,” Cadmus growls, and this time Jessica knows enough to let it drop. They walk the rest of the way home in silence.   
  
Yeah, so much for socializing.

* * *

Something about the pent-up aggression of that night stays with Jessica for the next few days. She spends them short-tempered and irritable, snapping at the smallest inconvenience and jumping at shadows even more than usual, which of course only serves to piss her off further. She keeps thinking she can see a flicker of purple in the dark, the flash of beetle-bright wings in the corner of her eye. It makes her sick and nauseous and furious, all at once. 

Cadmus picks up on her mood and amplifies it. When they find Malcolm fumbling through their fridge one afternoon, Cadmus snarls at Malcolm’s capybara daemon with so much fury that Lavinia actually runs and hides behind the counter, and it takes another ten minutes to get the two calm enough to kick them out. Jessica can tell that Cadmus feels bad about it from the way he slinks underneath her chair afterwards and refuses to speak for the rest of the day. 

So by the time a couple of clueless thugs intercept them in a back alley as Jessica and Cadmus are walking home from a stakeout that night, it honestly almost comes as a relief. It’s not that she enjoys hitting people—she doesn’t, she never has—but she’s spent long enough spoiling for some kind of fight that bashing the heads of a few would-be robbers against a wall will at least let off a little of the restless steam that’s been building up inside her.

“Hand over the purse, lady,” the first man says, sounding like he’s reading directly from the script of some 1930s gangster thriller. The coyote daemon at his side growls to underscore the words, and Cadmus bristles in response.

Jessica laughs. There’s a sunburst of adrenaline exploding inside her veins, and her head feels clear and light as she shrugs the camera strap over her shoulder “Seriously? All the time in the world to come up with a good opening line, and that’s the one you went with?”

“I won’t ask twice.” He flicks open a switchblade, the steel blade gleaming dully in the dim light. The other man copies him, his rat daemon chittering excitedly from his shoulder as he moves closer to Jessica. 

“Great,” she drawls, dropping the camera to the ground and crossing her fingers that it won’t be broken when she goes to pick it up again. “That should speed this along. Hop to it, boys, you know I don’t have all night.”

But just as the first man raises his knife and makes as if to rush toward her, a dark shape comes hurtling out of nowhere to knock him off his feet. A second later the guy’s out cold, flat on his back, and the coyote daemon slumps down beside him, unable to maintain consciousnessness on her own. 

Jessica stares. “What the hell?”

The new man is dressed in an honest-to-God red jumpsuit, with a matching mask covering his upper face like he thinks he’s some kind of ninja, what the hell, this city is so fucking weird. The weirdest part is that he moves like he’s some kind of ninja too, fast and fluid as he spins to the other would-be thief and disarms him in two smooth jabs, spinning him around and slamming him face-first into the brick wall just the way Jessica had been planning to. Well, fuck. Apparently you snooze you lose in this part of town. 

The weirdest part is that she can’t spot the masked man’s daemon anywhere. 

It could be small, she tells herself, and tucked inside his clothes somewhere—but somehow Jessica knows in her gut that isn’t true. There’s no daemon anywhere nearby who belongs to this man. She feels a cold curl of unease at the thought. It’s like he’s a ghost, or an evil spirit from a fairy tale. 

She’s heard of people who’ve been separated from their daemons, of course, and can travel long distances away from them, the way the witches can—it’s not quite as stigmatized as it used to be, though the procedure’s still pretty damn rare, for obvious reasons. Apparently some nutjobs out there go through with it willingly. People with aquatic daemons, mostly, so they don’t have to spend their whole lives standing on the shoreline. Jessica’s just never seen one herself before. 

Cadmus is quiet at her side, staring at the daemonless man in front of them. He’s sent the second thief running, and now he’s turning back to them as if to make sure they’re still there. 

“Who the hell are you?”

The man seems to regard them for a moment, though it’s hard to tell where he’s looking with that idiotic mask over his eyes. Jessica braces herself, ready for a confrontation—but then all he does is shrug slightly, as if that’s any kind of answer, before taking off up the fire escape like some crazy Russian acrobat, flipping and tossing his weight from one hand to the other as easily as Trish tosses an omelette. 

“What the hell?” Jessica calls after him. “That’s your play? Vanish into the night like a wannabe Phantom of the Opera?” But the man has already disappeared from view. She bends down to pick up her fallen camera, glancing aside at Cadmus as she does. “Okay, that was some seriously weird comic book bullshit.”

Cadmus snorts. “Let’s just get out of here before the cops show up,” he says sensibly. 

He’s got a point, so they do. Jessica checks out the pockets of the knocked-out thief before they go, just in case there’s anything interesting, but all she finds is a couple quarters and a half-empty box of cigarettes, no wallet or ID. As far as she can tell, the guy really was just some hapless thug. 

“Tough luck, asshole,” she tells his unconscious body. Cadmus gives an impatient huff, so she leaves it at that and they take off. There’s still adrenaline sparking through her blood, all the frustrated tension of the almost-fight pulsing in her ears and fingertips and no one to take it out on. 

Jessica grits her teeth, thinks ungrateful thoughts at the masked douchebag out skipping across the rooftops somewhere behind her, and keeps walking. 

When they get home, the first thing Jessica does is open her laptop and start typing out a search. 

Apparently, she’s missed a few things while walking around in a whiskey haze trying to scrape the Kilgrave memories from her head with her fingernails. She vaguely remembers seeing something in the news about some masked domestic terrorist stalking the neighborhood a while back, but honestly, Jessica had had bigger problems to worry about. She still does.

But the thing is, now she’s curious. So she plays a couple low-res news clips—and yep, that’s her guy alright, even in a different costume she recgonize the way he moves—pulls up all the articles she can find, even digs up a couple of old forum posts from a while back, people claiming to have been saved from robbery or assault by a man dressed all in black—a man with no daemon. 

Seems like the guy’s gotten himself an upgrade since then, if that unimaginably stupid red outfit is anything to go by. The papers seems split now as to whether or not they’re still calling him a terrorist or a local hero. _The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen_ , one particularly florid headline screams out at her from the screen. Apprently the local papers took the part where this guy's got no daemon and ran with it. In old backcountry folklore, that’s how you can recgonize the Devil if he comes knocking—because the Devil lost his soul a long time ago. 

_Daredevil Collars Fisk_ , another headline shouts. _Mystery Figure Brings End to Daring Escape_. Jesus Christ, just reading this shit is giving her second-hand embarrassment. Whoever the hell vigilante-boy is, he’s sure got a flare for the dramatic. 

“What a freak,” she mutters. Cadmus barks a laugh. “Yeah, yeah, I’m one to talk, whatever. At least I never let Trish get me into that fucking jumpsuit.” Whereas this guy is actually out wearing his in public. Well, maybe he’s got a fetish, who can say.

Cadmus looks unimpressed. Jessica keeps reading.

* * *

The next time Nelson calls her up with a case, Jessica hesitates before accepting it. But then she calls herself an idiot and gets the fuck over it, because their money’s just as good as anyone else’s and Jessica isn’t some wilting flower who can’t handle ten seconds of awkward conversation for a paycheck. 

The case turns out to be a straightforward one, and Jessica has their info in less than thirty-six hours. So she sighs, puts on her big-girl panties, and picks up the phone to call it in. It’s still early in the evening, and she figures no one would have gone home for the day for another couple hours at least.

But nobody picks up at the office, and neither does Nelson when she tries his cell. She has better luck with Murdock, however, who answers on the first ring. 

“That was fast,” he comments pleasantly when she tells him the news.

“I’m good at my job. When do you want me to drop off the file? I called the office first, but no one answered.”

“Yeah, Karen’s out for the day and Foggy’s busy with a client. Tell you what, why don’t I drop by your office and pick it up myself? I’m in the neighborhood now.”

Jessica can’t think of an excuse in time, so twenty minutes later she’s swinging open her door to find Murdock standing on the other side, cane in one hand and briefcase in the other, and Philomena curled comfortably around his neck. She wonders belatedly if she should have gone down to meet him outside—but apparently they’d found the right door without her help, blind or not, and anyway it’s too late now. 

“Hello, Ms. Jones. There’s a man down the hall talking to himself,” Murdock says by way of greeting, jerking his head behind him as he speaks. “Is he alright?”  
  
“Oh, Malcolm,” Jessica says distractedly, glancing over Murdock’s shoulder to see her neighbor leaning against his door, fumbling with the keys as Lavinia slumps dizzily by his feet. They’re both obviously high as a couple of kites. “Hang on.” 

She leaves Murdock standing in the doorway while she strides down the hall, Cadmus trailing at her heels. “Hey, Malcolm.”

“Jessica.” Malcolm scrapes up a dazed smile when he sees her. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“I do.” Taking the keys from his hand, she quickly flips through them until she’s found the right one, then slides it into the lock and swings open the door. 

“Friend of yours?”

“Well, he’s a lawyer, so not exactly.” Cadmus gives a soft yip to wake Lavinia from her doze, and the capybara shakes her head before stumbling to her feet, following Malcom inside. “Get some sleep, Malcolm.”

“Sure thing,” Malcolm says dreamily, and Jessica has no idea whether he’s talking to her or one of the voices in his head. He closes the door behind him, though, so that’s a start.

Murdock’s waiting for her just inside the office when she returns, like he isn’t sure if he had permission to step any further into the room. Smart of him. He’s got a funny expression on his face, wry and a little bemused, as if he’s just figured out the answer to a question he hadn’t really meant to ask. Jessica has no idea what could have put it there, and she isn’t sure she wants to.

Dammit. Curiosity was always her original sin. Of course she wantst to know. She just doesn’t want to want to. 

“Spit it out, Murdock.”

He tips his head to the side. “Spit what out?”

Jessica rolls her eyes. “Whatever it is you’re not saying. Just tell me, I know you want to.”

His lips twitch in a smile. “I didn’t expect you to be so neighborly, is all.”

And that’s what she gets for asking. Jessica just snorts, then turns to walk past him to her desk. “Here’s your file.” 

“Great, thank you.”

As she reaches out to hand it to him her sleeve rides up, revealing a few inches of pale skin—and with it, a few of the deep, healing bites Cadmus had left on her a couple days ago during a particularly bad flashback. 

Philomena lets out a soft hiss at the sight, and Murdock’s head cocks at the sound, mouth pulling up quizzically at one corner. “Mena?”

“She’s injured,” the snake says.

Annoyed, Jessica jerks her sleeve down and takes a step back, feeling Cadmus brush up against the backs of her legs as she does. “It’s nothing. Got bit by a dog on stakeout the other week, that’s all.”

“That doesn’t sound like nothing. Did you get it checked out?”

“I heal fast,” Jessica snaps. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Ms. Jones—“

“Enough with the mother hen act, Murdock. Whoever said it was a good look on you was lying through their teeth.”

The lawyer actually has the gall to chuckle and raise both hands palms up, like a peace offering. “Okay, okay. I can take a hint.”

“Can you?”

“Well, I try.”

“Try harder,” she suggests. She takes another step back as she does, then reaches behind her to snag the bottle of jack on her desk with one hand. Normally she tries not to drink in front of clients, but she figures if Murdock wants to act all buddy-buddy by cooing over a couple bite marks he can handle watching her swig whiskey in front of him too. Besides, she’s technically not on the job any more—she already handed him the file. 

“Is that whiskey I smell?” he asks as she lowers the bottle, wiping her mouth with her sleeve as she swallows against the pleasant burn. 

She eyes him narrowly. “Good nose.”

“I don’t suppose you’d want to share?” He smiles again when Jessica doesn’t reply right away, just licks her lips and watches him, surprised by the request. “It’s been a long day.”

“Whatever,” she says at last, and hands him the bottle, nudging the neck against the tips of his fingers to make sure he can locate it without seeing it coming. Murdock grabs hold of it easily enough. Then she watches, eyebrows slightly raised, as he tips his head back and takes a long, deep drink, throat bobbing as he tries to down about a third of the contents in one go. “Christ, Murdock, don’t drown.”

The smile has turned self-deprecating by the time he lowers the bottle. “Like I said, long day, Ms. Jones.” There’s something exhausted in the set of his brown eyes as they stare off into the space just above her head that makes Jessica think he’s telling the truth. 

So Jessica sighs and swipes the bottle from his hand, knocking back another swallow. “You know, if you’re going to come all the way out here and drink my whiskey, you might as well call me Jessica.” At this point, ‘Ms. Jones’ is just starting to sound kind of ridiculous coming out of his mouth. 

“Jessica it is,” he says mildly. He lifts one hand to stroke a finger across the scales at the top of Philomena’s head. “You’ve always been welcome to call me Matt, you know. Our firm isn’t exactly a stickler for formality.”

“Yeah, I noticed that.” Obviously Jessica’s not going to take him up on the offer—she doesn’t want the guy to start thinking they’re _friends,_ Jesus. But after a moment, she passes the bottle back to him, and is a little surprised when he wordlessly accepts it and takes another drink. Apparently Murdock wasn’t kidding around when he said it was a long day. 

They wind up leaning back against her desk together, trading the bottle back and forth as the sky grows darker outside the windows. Cadmus even relaxes enough to sprawl out on the floor on her other side, his bulk a warm weight across her left foot, though his eyes stay open and alert the whole time. 

“You know,” Murdock says thoughtfully, “This is terrible whiskey.” Philomena has left her perch around his neck to coil on the desk behind him, and Jessica finds herself weirdly distracted by the flicker of red scales in the corner of her vision. There's something soothing about it, in a way she doesn't know how to put into words.

“You can stop drinking it any time.”

“Not a criticism,” he says, raising the bottle to his lips with an amused quirk of his eyebrows. “Just an observation.”

“Yeah, well, I buy in bulk.”

“Very economical.”

“Yeah,” Jessica snorts, “That’s me.”

His eyes crinkle when he smiles in way that Jessica finds unexpectedly appealing. She’d never noticed before, with those dark glasses he usually wears. “I guess I’d better pay you back in kind sometime. I still owe you that drink, remember.”

Jessica’s not really interested in remembering that embarrassment of a night, so she just shrugs and looks away. “Whatever.”

There’s a few seconds of silence. It’s not uncomfortable, exactly, but it feels…weirdly intimate, for some reason Jessica can’t quite place. She shifts against the desk, and is just clearing her throat to speak when Murdock beats her to it. 

“Jessica,” he says quietly. “About that night. I wanted to ask…” Then he trails off, as if he’d had second thoughts about the end of his sentence halfway through speaking it.

Jessica feels her shoulders starting to tense. At her feet, Cadmus goes still. Neither of them knows exactly where the conversation’s about to head, but they can both hazard a guess they won’t like it. Cadmus’s behavior around other daemons is obviously not normal—the way he flinches and growls at the slightest provocation, the way he still won’t talk to anyone in public, not even Jessica herself. His little spat with that boar daemon the other night was sure to raise the eyebrows of anyone paying attention. And if there’s one thing she’s learned about Murdock so far, it’s that he always pays attention.

So Jessica squares her shoulders and grits her teeth against the concern—or even worse, the pity—she’s pretty sure Murdock’s about to throw her way, prepared to kick him out as soon as he’s voiced it. “Ask what?”

But he surprises her by pausing first, then taking another drink before he speaks. Finally his mouth twitches down and he gives a little shake of his head. “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

Jessica waits another moment, watching him skeptically, but all he does is pass the bottle back to her with a slightly ironic smile. 

“It’s getting late,” he says. “I should probably head out.” He holds out a hand for Philomena. She regards it contemplatively for a moment before slithering along his arm to coil herself up into her usual spot around his neck and shoulders. “Thanks for the drink, Jessica.”

She crosses her arms as she watches him unfold his cane and head carefully for the door. He’s not swaying, so far as she can tell, but he did just imbibe a pretty significant amount of her cheap whiskey. “You want me to call you a cab or something?”

“No, no, I’ll be fine.”

Well, Jessica guesses he’s a better judge of it than her. Though she still finds herself eyeing him dubiously, alert to any signs of a stumble. “If you say so.”

“I do,” he says firmly, before softening the words with one last smile over his shoulder, like he thinks Jessica might get her feelings hurt or something if he doesn’t. Christ. Murdock might make for a sharp lawyer and a surprisingly decent drinking buddy, but he still’s such a weirdo. “Have a good night, Jessica.”

“See you around, Murdock.”

She watches him close the door behind him, then listens to the sound of his footsteps fading down the hall. When she glances down, Cadmus is already looking at her. “What do you think he was going to ask, anyway?”

Cadmus doesn’t answer. “I think he and Philomena have been fighting.”

“What?” Jessica blinks, dragging a hand through her hair. “What makes you say that?” She hadn’t picked up on any tension between the two of them—but then again, she’s always found reptile daemons hard to read. She wonders what kind of snakey body language Cadmus was noticing that she missed.

“I don’t know.” Cadmus’s eyes flick to the closed door in front of them. “There’s something off about her, though.”

“There’s something off about both of them.” Jessica shrugs. “Not really our business, though.” If Murdock was a case, she’d be thinking differently—but he wasn’t. And if there was one lesson Jessica had learned in the last couple years, it was that sometimes, it was better for everyone to just peace out of other people’s problems and leave well enough alone. As long as Murdock and his weirdness didn’t get in her way, Jessica could do him the favor of staying out of his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the curious -
> 
> golden jackal: hardy, adaptive, and opportunistic hunters and scavengers, with a local reputation for cleverness and trickery; can hunt cooperatively but are generally among the more solitary canines, not pack animals like wolves, and only live together as monogamous mated pairs; willing and able to dig through (and eat) people’s garbage  
> http://www.planetstillalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Golden-Jackal_0021A-1024x651.jpg
> 
> border collie: among the most intelligent of all domestic dog breeds; friendly, affectionate, and energetic, with workaholic tendencies and a strong herding instinct; sensitive and tractable, but not temperamentally fit to be a stay-at-home dog - they need the outlet of a job to be happy  
> https://www.warrenphotographic.co.uk/14663-chocolate-border-collie 
> 
> rosy-faced lovebird: a small parrot species, in the wild they live in flocks and feed on seeds and fruit; sociable, curious, intelligent, and bold, they are highly vocal, and were named ‘lovebirds’ for their tendency to form a close, lifelong mating bond with a single partner; although their sweet temperaments make them easily tamed, they are sensitive and energetic birds, and when kept in isolated conditions or undersized cages they often become depressed and neurotic, and can develop self-harming habits  
> https://ebird.org/species/peflov 
> 
> Also, yes, for those who've asked - Kilgrave will definitely be making an appearance, though it's a bit of a slow build to get there (much like the show). Eventually the plot here will catch up to JJS1, and then the story will be building off that narrative, with the differences (daemons, Matt's presence) making it veer more and more off course as we go.


	3. Chapter 3

The next time Jessica swings by the Nelson and Murdock office, it’s late afternoon, with smog heavy in the air and thick yellow light still falling through the unshuttered windows. Karen’s missing from the front desk, and she can hear raised voices coming from the other room, accompanied by a loud bark. 

Jessica and Cadmus exchange a glance as they step inside. “Think we should come back later?” she asks him.

Cadmus pauses for a moment at her side, then starts trotting forward towards the source of the sound.

“If you say so,” Jessica mutters, following after her daemon. She’s not so sure he’s got the right idea, but hey, she’s the one who asked. 

Nelson comes storming out the door before she can open it, though. Imogen follows him with her tail stretched out in a straight, angry line behind her. “Oh, hey Jessica,” he says, clearly startled, and draws up short when he sees her. 

“Hey.” Rocking back on her heels, she shoves her hands into her pockets and cocks her head, waiting for a cue. 

“Sorry, I forgot you were coming in today—I have to—“

“I’ve got it, Foggy,” Murdock says behind him. His face is flushed, and there’s an old bruise mottling his left cheek, turning it a magnificent sunset shade of purple. Philomena winds in restless red coils around his shoulders, obviously agitated. “You go ahead.”

Nelson’s face tightens at Murdock’s appearance, but all he does is say, “Fine, thanks, Matt,” in a clipped voice as he heads for the door. “Talk to you later, Jessica.”

“Sure,” Jessica drawls, watching him go. When the door swings shut behind him and Imogen she turns to look at Murdock. “Bad time?”

Murdock seems to sag a little against the doorframe after Nelson’s exit. “Just…rehashing an old argument.”

Jessica thinks of Trish, and despite herself, a tiny flicker of sympathy blooms in her chest. “Yeah, I know what those are like.”

Straightening his collar with one hand, Murdock sighs and jerks his chin in the direction of the room behind him. “Come on in.”

Once inside, Murdock seats himself at the table with a heavy exhale. Philomena winds herself down the back of his chair and onto the floor to curl up underneath the table, and his neck looks strangely bare and vulnerable without her. He slides a USB towards her with one hand. “That should have everything you’ll need.”

Jessica eyes him a moment, then pockets it without comment. “You alright, Murdock?”

“Oh, I’m fine, I’m just…” He trails off, removing his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose as his eyes shutter closed. If he’s trying to convince her of how fine he is, he’s doing a shitty job. “Do you ever get tired, Jessica?”

Jessica chews on her lip, deciding how to answer. “All the damn time,” she says at last. She’s a little surprised by her own honesty. It must have something to do with how pathetic Murdock looks, slumped over the table like that, and those huge dark bags under his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” He rubs his face, then slides the glasses back into place. “Do you want a drink?”

She takes a second to reply, but what the hell, it’s free booze. And Murdock does owe her one. “Sure.”

His mouths curves up a little at her easy agreement. “Hang on. There’s a bottle of bourbon in my desk I still haven’t opened.” He stands up to retrieve it from his office, and returns holding a bottle of golden liquor and two glasses in his free hand.

“Cups, huh?” Jessica says as she accepts her glass, seating herself at the table across from him. “Fancy.” Cadmus stretches out on the floor by her chair. He keeps a few safe feet between him and Philomena, but it’s still closer to another person’s daemon than she’s seen him get for a while. Huh, Jessica thinks, and then decides she’s better off not thinking about it.

Murdock scrapes up the shadow of a laugh. “That’s right, nothing but the best at Nelson and Murdock.”

Smirking, Jessica reaches out to open the bottle, whistling slightly as she takes in the label. “Damn, Murdock.” This is the good stuff, nothing like her bargain barrel jack at home. “You sure you want to waste this on me?”

“It was a gift. I’m not much of a bourbon man, most of the time. This is as good an excuse as any to make a start on it. And I do owe you that drink, remember.”

“If you say so.” Jessica pours a couple fingers into one glass, then slides it across the table to him, careful to make enough noise as she does that he can follow the motion. Then she pours another for herself and takes an appreciative gulp. It goes down bright and smooth and golden, as different as possible from the cheap burn she’s used to scratching her throat on. “Nice,” she can’t help but comment, studying the glass thoughtfully. She’d better not get used to this stuff—she can’t afford to start cultivating good taste in liquor now. 

“Mm,” Murdock agrees, taking a more restrained sip of his own. 

“So.” Running a finger along the top of her glass, Jessica gives Murdock a quick once-over. She likes him better like this, tired and almost scruffy-looking, with that dark bruise on his cheek and thick stubble covering the clean line of his jaw. His sleeves are rolled up and his tie is loose, hanging in a crooked line down his chest. It’s the most honest she’s seen him, without that too-slick Sunday school charm covering up the jagged edges. “You want to talk about it, or you want distracting from it?”

Murdock takes another drink, then puts the glass down with a decisive click as he swallows. “Distracting,” he says firmly. 

Jessica gives a shrug. “Alright.” So she launches into a brief description of the latest love quadrangle she’d stumbled across for a case. This one even has two men in matching playboy bunny ears, which at least makes it more memorable than most. Murdock is chuckling quietly by the time she finishes. 

“Did you always want to be a P.I.?”

“No.” Jessica swallows some more bourbon, listening to Cadmus’s quiet breathing at her feet. “I didn’t really want to be anything, for a while.”

“What changed your mind?”

Instead of answering, Jessica reaches for the bottle to refill her cup. They’ve been drinking steadily for a while now. Jessica’s probably had twice as much as Murdock, but that’s pretty standard for her. Murdock doesn’t seem all that interested in keeping up; if she didn’t know better, she’d say he was just drinking for the company, instead of using the company as an excuse to drink, like a normal person. He must really be desperate, if he’s willing to settle for company like hers.

“Did you always want to be a lawyer?”

Murdock smiles a little, accepting the refusal, and sips at his cup. “No. I wanted to be a boxer.”

“So what got you into law?”

“Well,” he says mildly, “I went blind, for one thing. Not a lot of blind boxers out in the ring.” Jessica bites back her wince. Yeah, she’d walked right into that one. Murdock’s lips twitch up as if he can somehow sense the buried dismay on her face. “And for another…I don’t know. I wanted to make a difference, I guess. And law seemed like the way to do it.”

“God, you really are such a goody-goody,” Jessica groans, shoving back in her chair. “Well, Dudley Do-Right? How’d that turn out for you? Are you making enough of a difference yet?” 

Murdock’s laugh is soft and self-deprecating. “Some days more than others, I think.” He knocks back the rest of his glass in one gulp, and Jessica obligingly pours him a refill. “What about you?”

Leaning forward on her elbows, Jessica licks the whiskey from her lips and taps a restless finger against the glass. “What about me?” she repeats, already wary.

“Is the private investigator business all you hoped?”

“Well it’s keeping me in rent and booze money, so pretty much.”

His smile slants up automatically, but she can tell he’s not satisfied by the reply. “There must be something else you’re getting from it, though. Something more than just the rent. Helping people, or, or finding answers—“

“How’d you get that bruise?” Jessica asks loudly, cutting him off. 

Murdock blinks, his mouth falling shut. “Oh, I—walked into a door. It was stupid, I wasn’t paying attention—“

“Uh huh.” Jessica doesn’t try to hide the skepticism in her voice. “Looks like the door had a mean right hook.”

There’s that self-deprecating laugh again, as he reaches up to touch the bruised cheek with self-conscious fingers. “That bad, huh?”

“Worried about your pretty face, Murdock?”

“Why?” Murdock cocks his head, a challenging light gleaming in his unfocused eyes. “Are you?”

Jessica looks at him, an unexpected flare of heat curling low in her stomach, and for a second, she—she thinks about it. 

Matthew Murdock’s about as far as you can get from her usual type—too buttoned up for her taste, soft-spoken bordering on genteel in a way that normally sets her teeth on edge. And it still does, a little. But right now, in the fading light of late afternoon, with a bruise on his face and bourbon in his hand—yeah, she thinks about it. A couple years ago she might even have acted on it. 

But as a general rule, Jessica doesn’t sleep with people she ever plans to see again—especially not these days. She’s had a few hookups since escaping Kilgrave, and they felt good, in a way—taking back her body, doing what she wanted with it, proving she could. But it’s always awkward with Cadmus glowering in the corner, snapping at any daemon stupid enough to get too close. And she knows that Cadmus doesn’t enjoy it, not really, not like she does. So it’s been a while since she bothered. 

And Murdock is—well, Cadmus has been so weird about Philomena, she doesn’t know how he would react to a hookup, to be honest. But Murdock’s firm has been a decent client, and…Jessica isn’t sure if she really wants to never see him again.

So instead of leaning in, she leans back. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Counsellor. I’m just worried my checks will start to bounce, if you break your neck falling down a flight of stairs.”

Murdock leans back too. It’s creepy how good he is at that, picking up on her cues, even when he can’t see to interpret half the physical ones. “Well, we can’t have that.” Whatever light she’d thought she was reading in his eyes is gone now. Jessica’s already half-convinced she imagined it in the first place. He’s smiling again, that slight, pleasant curve of the mouth he seems able to paste on at the drop of a hat, somehow sincere and utterly false all at once.

Finishing her cup, Jessica swipes the back of her hand across her mouth and finally shoves her chair backward. “Thanks for the booze, Murdock, but I’d better head out.” It feels strange to be making the responsible choice for a change, but hell, apparently there’s a first time for everything.

“Of course.” Murdock keeps up his easy smile. “Don’t let me keep you.” He pauses for the briefest of seconds, then adds casually, “Let’s do it again sometime.”

Glancing at him, Jessica hesitates as she gets to her feet. “Yeah, maybe.” She swallows against the rich taste of the bourbon in her mouth, then gives Cadmus a gentle nudge with her toe. “Cadmus? You ready?

Cadmus rouses himself reluctantly from his spot on the floor, where he seems to have been engaging Philomena in some kind of silent staring match. She reaches down to scritch the spot behind his ear that he likes, and he lets out a soft huff as he trails after her to the door. 

“Hey, Murdock?” She pauses in the doorway before she turns to go. 

“Yes?”

She grimaces, dragging a hand through her hair. “Get some rest, okay? You seriously look like shit.”

Murdock’s soft laughter follows her down the hall. 

* * *

Of course, Jessica knew better than to think the responsible choices were going to last. 

What happens next is this: she finally tracks down the address of the husband of the woman she killed. 

His name is Luke Cage, and the bar he runs is called Luke’s, logically enough. What’s worse is that it’s an easy walk from her apartment. 

“We shouldn’t go,” Cadmus tells her tiredly. He knows as well as she does that they’re going to. 

“I know we shouldn’t,” Jessica snaps back at him. But the thing is—she killed this guy’s wife. Her stomach twists as she paces back and forth across her office, rationalizing. He could be heartbroken, grieving—he could need money, maybe, or have creditors crawling at his door in need of someone to punch them. He could—

“He could want to be left alone,” Cadmus says. 

Jessica sneers wordlessly at him, and keeps pacing. 

In the end they go, of course. Not inside the bar—Jessica’s not that stupid, at least not yet. But she finds a convenient perch on a balcony across the street, exactly the right level to peer into the windows on the other side, say, or watch a widower carry out the trash to the dumpster down the block.

Luke Cage carries himself like a man who knows how to use the muscles cording his broad-shouldered frame. He’s got dark brown skin, a smooth-shaved head, and the kind of striking good looks that would make Jessica sit up straight and pay attention if she saw him in any other context than this one. Cadmus seems to feel the same, from the way he leans forward in sudden sharp interest when Luke’s pale-furred bear daemon pads out the door behind him. 

The man looks tired and slumped, alright, like someone who’s had his heart recently ripped from his chest, and Jessica can feel the guilt scratching like a wild animal inside her own chest while she watches. Maybe that’s what she really came here for—to hurt herself, watching him hurt, to punish herself enough that she can quiet the voices in her head telling her there’s no point, the world would be better off if she’d just lay down and die, telling her she’d deserve it. 

Maybe she doesn’t deserve that, but she does deserve this—kneeling here uncomfortably in the dark, the chill biting at her hands and the guilt biting at her heart, feeling that sharp stabbing pain every time she catches sight of Luke’s face, or his daemon’s. Cadmus is crouching motionless at her side, and she can hear a faint whine scratching at his throat, trying to get free. She buries a hand in the thick fur of his ruff and holds on tight enough to hurt.

The worst part is that the man’s exactly her type: tall, dark, and a self-destructively bad idea.

Jessica watches him, and imagines climbing down from her perch. She imagines walking right up to him and confessing it all: my name is Jessica Jones, and I murdered your wife. She imagines the look on his face at her words.

She stays where she is.

They leave a couple hours later, stiff and clumsy from the cold. “That’s it, okay?” she tells Cadmus that night. “We won’t go back.”

“Sure,” Cadmus says. He doesn’t meet her eyes, and Jessica doesn’t try to make him.

A week later, they go back. 

* * *

Cadmus stops talking again, after that. For a while he even stops sleeping in the bed with her at night, the way he did in those first days after Kilgrave’s death, when the two of them could hardly bear to look at each other, let alone touch.

Cadmus settled after the car accident that killed the rest of their family. It was the shape he’d taken when they both climbed sullenly into the car that day, sniping at Phillip and Sephronia in the backseat and fighting over that stupid Gameboy. When Jessica had woken up in the hospital later to the sound of Trish’s voice, she’d turned her head to seat Cadmus in that same jackal shape, and she knew. 

Sometimes they both took a chilly comfort in it, knowing that the shape Cadmus had chosen was the last shape her family had ever seen him in. It was a way of staying connected to them, keeping them close even now, when Cadmus and Jessica were the only ones left.

Other times, it felt less comforting. Some people were superstitious about jackal daemons, the same way they could be about snakes or crows or black cats—all the traditional shapes that bad luck took to stalk the world. Jackals used to be symbols of death and desolation. The Bible described them howling in the ruins of lost cities, long after they’d burned down to the ground. Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, was always depicted with a jackal head. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, was sometimes said to appear in the form of a jackal. And people remembered, even now.

It’s all bullshit, of course. Jessica knows that, and she’s told Cadmus plenty of times—she doesn’t believe in any of that daemon folklore nonsense, never has. Just because Cadmus settled as a jackal doesn’t mean he’s somehow doomed them both to a lifetime of desolation, or whatever. They might still be doomed to that, sure, but it’s not Cadmus’s fault. She doesn’t blame him.

But sometimes, late at night, with her hands trembling and the booze going to her head and Cadmus curled up on the opposite side of the room from her, as far as he can get—sometimes, she can’t help but wonder. 

“You look tired,” Murdock comments, the next time he sees her.

Jessica scowls and doesn’t look at Cadmus where he’s trailing a good yard and some feet behind her. “Thanks.”

“I just meant—have you been sleeping alright?”

“Like the dead,” Jessica snaps, and he finally changes the subject.

She’s not sure what to call her thing with Murdock anymore. They’re not friends, because Jessica doesn’t have friends, Jessica has Trish and that’s it—or at least, she used to have Trish. She’s not sure where Trish stands on that point anymore. She’s not sure where either of them do.

So she’s not friends with Murdock, whatever it might look like from the outside. He’s just some kind of—infrequent drinking buddy, a casual acquaintance with a few platonic benefits. She’s rung him up for tips on a case a couple times, when she needed help figuring out the legal technicalities of tracking down a runaway, or someone with a contact on the police force willing to put in a good word for her. And yeah, sure, maybe Jessica’s even returned the favor once or twice—but that still doesn’t make them friends.

Anyway, from what she can tell, Murdock doesn’t exactly have a lot of room in his life for friendship either. His workplace dynamics are already weird as fuck, now that she’s been around enough to notice. The way he and Nelson go from best buds one day to barely speaking the next, the way they both dance around Karen like they’re bulls and she’s the china teashop, the way Karen watches Murdock, and Nelson watches her watching Murdock, and Murdocks strolls around pretending not to notice any of it—Jesus, what a mess. It makes Jessica grateful she works alone.

She’s started keeping an eye on the local Devilman sightings, more for curiosity’s sake than anything else, and after a while she notices something interesting—the sightings are always located in Hell’s Kitchen, yeah, but more than that, they tend to center around the neighborhood containing the offices of Nelson and Murdock in particular. Almost as if spandex man has some reason for wanting the streets to be boringly safe in their specific part of town. 

But Jessica’s not really sure what to make of it, so she’s willing enough to let it drop—at least until her second encounter.

Her latest case for Hogarth is tangled enough that Jessica actually gets out the alethiometer to speed it along. Cadmus isn’t too pleased with the call, but then again, Cadmus isn’t too pleased with anything she does lately, so his disapproval doesn’t exactly comes as a shock.  
The alethiometer sends her to an insurance agent just a couple of blocks down from Nelson and Murdock, and a little snooping and some light breaking and entering later, Jessica has enough no-questions-asked evidence of financial corruption to satisfy even Hogarth at her sharkiest. 

She and Cadmus are walking back down the empty street when Cadmus’s head swings sharply left, his ears pricking up. A second later Jessica hears it too: a grunt of pain, and then the soft thud of a fist hitting flesh. 

Breaking into a jog, she rounds the corner and follows the sound down a narrow alley with Cadmus close on her heels. In the flickering light of the broken streetlamp overhead, Jessica can make out exactly the scene she expected to find: the freak in the red suit, fighting what looks like three guys from that criminal element she keeps hearing about in the news. Though for all she knows they could be priests getting mugged on their way to church by some creep with a leather kink. Their three daemons—a seagull, a big shaggy dog, and something brown and ferret-shaped over there in the shadows—are snarling and circling around the edges of the fight, but they can’t do much when there’s no enemy daemon for them to attack, and they’re obviously not going to risk touching the man himself. 

There’s a distinctive click as one of the guys pulls out a gun. Okay, maybe not a priest after all. Spandex boy deals with him fast, sending the gun flying one way and the guy flying hard into the wall in the opposite direction, and Jessica bites back a wince at the crunch of breaking bones.

Edging as close to the fight as she can while the four men are distracted, she pulls out her camera and starts snapping pictures. 

“I thought we believed in minding our own business now,” Cadmus says, a low growl roughening his voice as he speaks.

Jessica stiffens, resisting the urge to turn to look at the jackal beside her. It’s the first thing Cadmus has said to her for weeks. 

“We are minding our own business,” she says, instead of doing something stupid like grinning at him. “I’m a private investigator. Collecting evidence is my business.”

“Evidence of what,” Cadmus grumbles. “No one hired us to photograph any fashion-blind Karate Kids with delusions of justice.” 

It’s not really a question, but Jessica’s about to answer anyway when she’s interrupted by one of the men making a break for it. She’s not really planning to interfere—criminal element or not, she’s got no beef with a couple of strangers getting beat up in a back alley—but then the guy’s dog daemon spots Cadmus as they near the mouth of the alley, and she makes the spectacularly bad decision to leap towards him with a sharp bark. 

“Look out!” Spandex dude shouts, like he’s got some investment in her and Cadmus staying in one piece—Christ, the forums are right, he really is an unbearable do-gooder—and makes as if to intercept the guy, though there’s no way he’ll reach them in time.

Jessica would laugh if she could spare the second. Instead she straightens from her crouch, hooks the camera over her shoulder, and sends the man sprawling with a solid kick to his gut. From the corner of her eye, she can see Cadmus dragging the dog daemon to the ground with his teeth buried in her throat, snarling and shaking his head back and forth to knock her off balance as she twitches in his hold. A few moments later she whines and goes still, offering the pale fur of her belly in submission.

“Sariel!” The man starts struggling back to his feet, but he doesn’t get far before the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen has a hand hooked in his collar and his face slammed hard into the nearest brick wall. He says something soft and threatening into his ear, and the man finally goes limp. 

Cadmus, apparently deciding he’s done, lets the dog daemon go, though his ears are still pressed flat to his head and teeth bared in a clear warning. The dog daemon just whines again, her head low to the ground, and takes off running after her human when Daredevil finally releases the man with a hard shove. A moment later the two of them have fled. 

Jessica staggers a couple steps back and adjusts her scarf, adrenaline still pumping through her. “Cadmus?” she asks, and Cadmus gives his head a shake before ambling over to her side, looking entirely uninjured and distinctly pleased with himself. Behind him she can make out the prone forms of the other two presumable-criminals—knocked out or dead, she can’t tell from here. The papers say Hell’s Kitchen’s local daemonless vigilante never kills, but the papers have been wrong before.

That leaves her and Cadmus alone with the man in the mask. He’s standing a few yards away, seemingly surveying the two of them with a tilt to his head. He’s breathing hard but otherwise doesn’t look much the worse for wear, having dispatched his two assailants with freakish ease. Though Jessica’s taking the credit for the third one, thanks.

“You again,” she snorts, crossing her arms and straightening her shoulders, bracing her feet against the pavement in case he decides to go for her next. “Hey Devil-boy, you know Halloween’s still five months away, right?”

“I’ll make a note.” His voice is low and hoarse, almost like he’s deliberately roughening it as he speaks. Something about it makes Jessica jerk and narrow her eyes, trying to work out what it is that’s making her fingers twitch at the sound. “Are you alright, ma’am?”

Jessica rolls her eyes. “I’m fine.”

“You should be more careful,” he rasps. “You could get hurt.”

At that, Jessica actually barks out a laugh. “First of all asshole, I can take care of myself, in case you didn’t notice. Second, you’re seriously one to talk. What’s with the spandex, is this some kind of BDSM roleplay shit—hey!”

While she’s speaking, the guy steps forward and snags the camera off her arm, fast a snake—way too fast for her to react. Then, while Jessica’s still flinching back and glaring, he tosses it hard at the ground. It shatters with a loud crack.

“What the fuck?”

“Sorry,” he says over Cadmus’s outraged growl, not sounding sorry at all. “I’m camera-shy.”

Then, before Jessica can slug him in that stupid mask the way he so richly deserves, he flips himself backwards into the dark, bounding off the top of the dumpster and onto a fire escape, just like last time. Two seconds later he’s made it onto the roof and away.

“Do you know how much that thing cost?” Jessica shouts after him. She could probably catch up in a jump or two, but she’s not really in the mood for a rooftop chase after some sadomasochistic freak with a grudge against cameras tonight. “Fucking asshole.”

She glances at Cadmus to see if he has anything to add, but her daemon has lapsed back into his usual silence, starting up at the roof with a thoughtful expression on his face but apparently nothing at all to say about it. 

Even after that, Jessica might still have been willing to leave it alone. She’s annoyed about the camera, yeah, and the guy’s obviously a lunatic, but he’s not exactly her most pressing concern right now.

That changes when she and Cadmus come home a few days later to find a cardboard box sitting in front of their door.

Jessica freezes when she sees it, because she definitely hasn’t ordered any packages lately. 

It’s not from him, she tells herself firmly. It’s not from Kilgrave, because Kilgrave is dead. She saw his death certificate. Her rapist is not sending her packages from beyond the grave—it’s got to be something from Trish, maybe, some kind of weird reaching-out gesture, or—

“What does it smell like?” she asks Cadmus before she bends down to touch it, just to be safe.

Cadmus edges closer, nose wrinkling as he sniffs the brown cardboard. But apparently he doesn’t get any unusual scents off it, because he just bobs his head in a kind of shrug and backs away, looking puzzled. So Jessica brings it inside. 

When she opens it, she starts swearing and doesn’t stop till she’s run out of breath. 

It’s a shiny new camera. The same make and model as her old one, but a more expensive brand, the kind she’d looked at in the catalogue and quickly passed over as too far outside her price range. It’s a camera, and there’s only one person out there who knows she needs a camera right now.

“Fuck.” She drops it back into the box with a hiss. “That fucking—“ She spins away on her heel, momentarily too angry to think of an insult harsh enough. For a second she sees purple in the corner of her vision, jewel-bright and gleaming. Her palms are sweating.

The freak knows where she lives. He followed her, or tracked her down somehow, and Jessica had no idea. 

It has to be some kind of threat. Back off and stop digging, or it won’t be a camera that shows up on her doorstep next time. Jessica’s hands curl into fists just thinking about it.

“Camera-shy my ass,” she growls, and throws herself into the chair at her desk, flipping open her laptop in the same motion. With a soft snarl, Cadmus jumps onto the desk next to it, craning his head to watch her fingers fly over the keyboard. “We’re going to nail this asshole.”

If Devil-boy thinks he can threaten her in her own apartment, he’s got another thing coming. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Matt: makes a gallant gesture  
> Jessica: what the everloving fuck. i’ll kill you. what the f


	4. Chapter 4

There’s a new file in the bottom drawer of Jessica’s desk. It’s labeled “horny man,” and it holds all the information on the Daredevil that Jessica has managed to scrounge up over the course of the last week. 

So far, she has to admit, it’s not a hell of a lot. But Jessica can be patient when she has to be. One way or another, she’s going to figure out the vigilante’s real identity. 

“I think we should try the alethiometer,” she tells Cadmus that night. 

Cadmus sighs loudly. “Has it been long enough?” He’s started breaking his stony silence a little in the last few days, though he still responds to her questions with grunts or growls more often than not.

“Sure,” Jessica says, even though she’s not. “The last time was, what, eight days ago? That’s plenty.”

She can tell Cadmus isn’t convinced, but he doesn’t seem to be in the mood for an argument. 

So she gets it out, and they settle into their usual position on her bedroom floor. “What do you think?” she asks quietly, letting her mind start to drift as she stares down at the gleaming golden device in her hands. 

After a moment, Cadmus presses his nose down onto the angel symbol. Jessica nods. That seems right, for tracking down a devil. 

Who is the Daredevil? she thinks. Then she starts turning the knobs.

The anchor hand spins to the bird, the serpent, and the ant. 

Bird for the soul, Jessica thinks—and for daemons. She’s pretty sure Devil-boy’s got one stashed away somewhere, she never bought into the theory that he’s some kind of soulless boogeyman…and the serpent for guile, maybe? Or a choice, especially the wrong one. And the ant, that was usually work, labor, diligence—could be something related to her job. A choice someone’s made about their daemon—a choice Jessica’s made?—involving work, a salaried position, maybe hard labor…fuck, she’s not making the right connections here at all…

It’s a trickier reading to unravel than she’s used to, and Jessica still hasn’t figured it out by the time the dizziness and the cramps start to hit. 

The next day, she’s still worrying over the strange reading like a sore tooth when she and Cadmus head out to Nelson and Murdock’s office. It’s not for a job, for once. Murdock called her up and asked if she’d be willing to swing by and take a look at some case files for a defense he was trying to build. Apparently he could use her investigator’s eye, or whatever. Jessica’s not really sure what that means, but she’s got the time, so she figures she might as well. Maybe Murdock will break out some of the good bourbon again as a thank you.

Murdock’s waiting for her in the conference room when she and Cadmus arrive. Philomena is uncoiled on the table, tail flicking thoughtfully back and forth as she scans a legal document, while Murdock’s fingers fly across another paper in braille. 

"Hey, Murdock."

His head tips up in greeting as they walk inside, and he flashes her a quick smile. “Hey, thanks for coming.”

Jessica shrugs. “I had nothing better to do.”

“Not busy cracking any big cases at the moment?”

“I’m working on something of my own,” she admits, “But I hit a wall. I’m hoping a break will clear my head, maybe.”

“Oh yeah?” Murdock stretches back in his chair, looking glad for the excuse to take a break of his own. “What kind of wall?”

“Ugh.” Jessica pulls out a chair to join him. “I ran into that vigilante freak the other week, Daredevilman or whatever, and now I think he’s stalking me.”

“What?” A flicker of surprise crosses Murdock’s face, and he leans forward, all signs of his earlier relaxation vanishing. “What makes you think that?”

“He sent a package to my door,” Jessica says darkly. “Which means he followed me home.”

“A package? What kind of package?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Cracking her knuckles, Jessica shoves a loose wedge of hair from her eyes and grimaces. “The point is, he wanted me to know he knows my address.”

Murdock seems to hesitate for a moment. “Jessica,” he says cautiously, “I have to say, I’ve followed the Daredevil’s activities in the news for a while now. And nothing I’ve heard suggests that he’s the kind of person who would threaten an innocent P.I.” She has to snort at the word ‘innocent,’ but Murdock just plunges on. “Are you sure you’re not, perhaps…misinterpreting a different kind of gesture?”

Jessica shoots a dubious look his way. “What other kind of gesture?”

“Well, what was in the package?”

Jessica opens her mouth—but before she can say anything, Cadmus leaps onto the table with a snarl, the sound rumbling low in his throat as his yellow eyes fix on Philomena. “Cadmus!”

Murdock jerks in his seat, startled, and Philomena rears up in front of him. Jessica’s just about to reach out and physically drag her psycho daemon away when a dangerous answering hiss spills from the snake’s mouth—and this time it’s Jessica’s turn to flinch as a red cobra hood flares up around Philomena’s head.

A cobra. Jessica freezes, staring. 

Jesus, Murdock’s daemon isn’t some innocent little corn snake—she’s a fucking _cobra_. No wonder Cadmus has been acting so weird around her.

“Philomena!” Murdock snaps, his voice sharper than Jessica’s ever heard it. 

But Cadmus isn’t looking to start a fight. He backs off as soon as Philomena reveals her hood, sitting back on his haunches by Jessica’s elbow with a satisfied slant to his mouth and a hungry gleam in his eyes. Jessica puts an automatic hand on his back, gripping the fur to feel his chest heave with his quick light breathing.

Philomena’s hood is still spread. “You aren’t funny,” she says, her voice half a hiss on the words. Jessica can see the flash of long white fangs as she opens her mouth.

Cadmus bares his own teeth and lets out a sound that’s half snarl, half laughter. Jessica’s pretty sure that’s his way of disagreeing. 

Part of her wants to tell him to knock it off. But the other part is staring across the table at the dark red cobra coiling in front of Murdock’s pale face. The cobra who’d deliberately kept her hood hidden, and let Jessica and Cadmus think she was nonvenomous for months. The glass face of the alethiometer rises up suddenly in her mind, and she pictures again the three symbols of her last reading: bird, serpent, ant. 

The bird was for daemons. The ant was for work. And the serpent…was for guile.

Fuck. 

“I’ve gotta go,” she tells Murdock, lurching gracelessly out of her chair. 

“Jessica?” He looks off-balance and confused, the picture of wide-eyed innocence. It makes Jessica want to reach out and plant a fist directly in the middle of that choirboy face. “What’s wrong?” 

“Hey, everything okay in here?” Karen asks with artificial brightness from the door. Her daemon is fluttering around her head in quick nervous circles, giving away the woman’s concern. Apparently, they’d been loud enough to be heard from the other room. “Matt?”

“Don’t sweat it,” Jessica says, brushing past her down the hall. “I was just leaving.”

“Jessica, hold on—“ 

Murdock’s fast, she’ll give him that. He follows her and Cadmus into the next room and manages to snag a hand around her wrist before she’s made it outside. How the hell did a blind man catch up with her so quickly? Well, that’s the motherfucking question, now isn’t it.

Temper flaring, Jessica whirls on him, yanking her arm out of his hold with her own hands in tight fists. “You grab me like that again, Murdock, I’ll punch you so hard you see.”

Murdock backs up instantly, giving her space and holding his hands out appeasingly at his sides. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t—“

“You sure didn’t,” she sneers. The anger is hot and pounding in her head now, a writhing heat in her chest like she’s just swallowed a live coal. There’s still a small, doubting voice inside her that wants to say it’s impossible, it can’t be true. But the rest of her is certain. She doesn’t know how and she doesn’t know why, but somehow Matthew Murdock, blind lawyer extraordinaire—somehow, he’s the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. 

Which also means he’s been lying to her for months. 

“Jessica—“

“Come on, Cadmus,” she says, instead of kicking the two-faced bastard in the balls the way she wants. “Let’s get out of here.”

They’re out the door before Murdock can get in another word.

* * *

Jessica spends the rest of the day fuming, shuffling and reshuffling the shit in her Daredevil folder and going through every detail of Matthew Murdock’s personal history she can find online with a fine-toothed comb.

It fits. It shouldn’t be possible, but it fits. 

Matthew Murdock moved back to Hell’s Kitchen after graduating summa cum laude from Columbia, and started up a firm with his classmate Franklin Nelson not long after—the same year that the first sightings of the man in black started to hit the internet. Jesus, she can practically pin it down to the same month. Nelson and Murdock even worked on the same case that took down Wilson Fisk, that criminal mastermind guy whose big escape from police custody Daredevil made himself infamous by foiling. They represented freaking Hoffman, the dirty cop who turned state’s evidence against him. Of course Devil-boy knew how to dismantle Fisk’s operation—he literally had the case files in front of him.

She thinks of all the telltale details she’d brushed off before, how the Daredevil seemed to operate so close to the Nelson and Murdock offices, how Murdock was always just a little too graceful for a blind man, a little too good at reading people. At reading Jessica. 

“I don’t believe this,” she tells Cadmus, who’s been pacing the room while she works, still restless from their trip to the law office. “It’s been fucking Murdock all this time.” Even his voice had been the same, that night—she could hear the resemblance now, thinking back to it. She should have realized sooner, but she’d been distracted by the camera and the cheap disguise. God, she’s such an idiot.

“It explains why he always smelled like blood.”

“And all those scrapes and bruises.” 

Jessica hadn’t been dumb enough to buy his excuses about walking into walls—Nelson had muttered about his partner having a drinking problem once, which Jessica wasn’t quite sold on, because she’s kind of the expert on those—but she has to admit, she hadn’t expected something like this to be the real reason.

“He and Philomena must be separated, somehow,” Cadmus adds, and Jessica nods grimly. She can’t find anything so far that would explain that part—Murdock isn’t related to any witch clans that she knows of, which is usually what leads non-witches to undergo the procedure. But maybe there’s a connection further up the family tree. “Do you think he’s even really blind?”

“I don’t know what the hell I think.” It was hard to believe anyone could be that good of an actor—but then, it was also hard to believe that Philomena had been some breed of cobra all along. Was it more or less likely that Murdock was faking, or that he had some other way of seeing the world without his eyes? 

Faking did seem more probable. But then again, Jessica was a 5’9” woman who could stop a slow-moving car with one hand, and she’d spent the year previous enslaved to a psychopath with mind-control powers—so she wasn’t ready to rule anything out. 

“Fuck.” Jamming the heels of her palms into her eyes, Jessica slumps back in her chair and tries to breathe. The anger is still thrumming inside her, bright and hot—but underneath it is curled something small and pathetic that feels a lot like hurt.

It’s stupid to feel betrayed. She and Murdock aren’t friends. He doesn’t owe her anything. He definitely doesn’t owe her the truth, even though she’s mad at hell at him for not giving it to her anyway. If Jessica has been starting to let herself think of Murdock as someone she could, occasionally, talk to—worse, someone she could even rely on, in a pinch, if things with a case went north or she had an off day—well, that’s her own fucking fault, isn’t it? Jessica should know better by now. 

She remembers his face when she was telling him about her encounter with Daredevil, back at his office—“What kind of package?” her ass, he knew exactly what she was talking about the whole time—and a sick, tangled knot of tension starts to coil in her stomach. Her face feels overheated. More than anything, really, it’s just embarrassing—the big bad P.I. couldn’t see the vigilante right under her nose. All because they shared a few drinks and she decided she liked Murdock enough to leave his secrets alone. Apparently Jessica wasn’t quite as proof against the innocent Sunday school act as she’d thought.

Murdock played her alright, and she fell for it: hook, line, and sinker.

A touch against her leg makes her look up. Cadmus has crossed the room to sit beside her, and the expression in his eyes is quiet, for once. “I liked them too,” he admits, and Jessica knows that it costs him something to say it out loud. 

So she bites out a tired laugh and scrubs a hand across her face, then slides out of her chair to sit on the ground next to Cadmus, leaning her head against his furry shoulder. “Yeah,” she says. “I know you did.”

For the first time in weeks, Cadmus crawls into bed with her that night.

* * *

Long story short, Jessica stops taking cases with Nelson and Murdock. She also stops taking their calls, period. 

Her finances don’t really take that much of a hit. Jessica had been lowering her rates for them, like a sucker, clearly buying into their whole saintly “we just want to help the poor and underprivileged” schtick a little too much. Without their charity cases cluttering her schedule, she’s got more time to work for real clients like Hogarth, who actually pays Jessica what she’s worth—plus about 30% more.

Nelson takes the hint, but Murdock turns out to be a persistent bastard. Jessica can’t say she’s all that surprised. You don’t get to be the Satanic bugbear of Hell’s Kitchen by giving up at the first five declined calls. 

By the sixth, though, she’s starting to think that maybe he’s just a little slow in the head. Or got punched in it one too many times in one of his spandex-clad nightly jaunts.

She finds him waiting for her and Cadmus outside their apartment complex a week later. It’s getting late, streetlights flickering on around them and the crowds thinned out on the sidewalks. She and Cadmus are headed to Luke’s bar, which means they’ve both been quiet and withdrawn for the last hour, avoiding each other’s eyes. 

Murdock stands a few feet away from the apartment entrance. Philomena is back around his neck, her tail beating a discordant pattern against his left sleeve. Murdock’s cane taps a matching pattern against the pavement as they step outside. He’s all buttoned-up and lawyerly-looking today, his hair neatly combed and his round glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

“Jessica.”

Growling under her breath, Jessica spins on her foot to face him. She might as well get this over with. “What do you want.” 

“I wanted to apologize,” he says smoothly. 

Jessica’s fingers twitch at her sides, but she doesn’t let them curl into fists—not yet. “For what.”

“Well—“ He hesitates, as if he hadn’t actually expected her to let him get this far. Tough luck, Counsellor. “You seemed upset, at the office. I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that. And now you won’t answer your phone—“

“Maybe because I don’t want to talk to you.”

Murdock proves that he’s one of the stupider men she’s met in recent memory by actually taking a step closer to her, instead of backing away at the venom in her tone. “Is this about Philomena? About her being a cobra? We’re sorry if you felt like we were, we were hiding it from you. People don’t always react well—“

Jessica’s laugh tastes hard and sour in her mouth. “I don’t care what species your daemon is, Devil-boy.”

And Murdock—goes very still. “What?”

“You heard me.”

He’s already smiling and shaking his head, the picture-perfect ingenue, all self-deprecating chuckle and aw-shucks tilt of his shoulders. It makes her sick. “Jessica, I don’t know what you—“

And Jessica smiles right back, curls her fingers, and steps forward to take a solid swing at his face, hard and fast and mean. 

And Murdock? He dodges it perfectly.

Then he stands there looking trapped, lips parted on a breath as Philomena rears up in surprise, her tongue flicking rapidly in and out of her mouth.   
  
“Yeah,” Jessica says. “That’s what I thought.” 

Part of her had still been hoping to be proven wrong—but this is it, right here. This is all the evidence she could ask for. The blind man fucking _dodged_. Which means he isn’t blind. Which means Jessica spent months deliberately making noise as she walked and holding open doors like some chump for a pathological liar who’s been laughing at her from behind those dark glasses all this time. 

“You can’t tell anyone.”

Jessica jerks a little in surprise, because the words don’t come from Murdock—they come from his daemon. Philomena has never spoken to her directly before. Jessica doesn’t think she’s ever heard her speak to another human, though she converses easily enough with Imogen and Lavinia at the office. 

“Philomena—“ Murdock looks startled too, though he covers it up fast enough, one hand going to rub his mouth as the other touches his daemon’s dully gleaming red scales. 

Cadmus brushes up against Jessica’s leg, and she swallows and crosses her arms, scraping up a scoff from somewhere in the back of her throat. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, I’m not interested in exposing you or whatever. Your kinky nighttime hobbies are your own business. Just don’t leave any more packages on my doorstep—I can do without your creepy gifts, thanks.”

“It was meant to be an apology,” Murdock says cautiously, apparently giving up on the denial. He’s smart enough to recognize a losing game. Too bad he’s not smart enough to quit trying to play her now. “For breaking your old one.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have broken it in the first place,” Jessica snaps, almost trembling with fury now. “You knew exactly who I was that night, and you just—Jesus Christ, Murdock, you’re fucking pathological, you know that?” She turns abruptly away, sick of the sight of his face. “You sure had me fooled.” 

“It wasn’t…it was nothing personal.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Murdock seems to realize it even as he’s speaking, because he winces a little at his own words, then leans forward as he prepares to try again. But Jessica’s done listening.

“Yeah, no shit.” She glances back at him one last time, then snorts and looks away. Damn, she really needs a drink. “Fuck off, Murdock. We’re done here.”

“Jessica—“

When Murdock steps after them, Cadmus actually takes a warning snap at him, driving him back. “Leave us alone,” her daemon snarls.

It figures that the first time Cadmus decides to speak to someone besides Jessica in over eleven months, it’s to tell them to fuck off. 

While Murdock and Philomena stand there gaping, Jessica takes off at a brisk walk in the opposite direction. Cadmus lopes stiffly at her side. 

A part of her wants to gape herself. Cadmus hasn’t said a word to anyone, human or daemon, besides Jessica since—since that night with Kilgrave. He hadn’t even spoken to Bassanio, back in the early days after they got free, drinking themselves sick on Trish’s couch. So doing it now, after all this time, just to tell off Philomela and her Devil-boy—well, Jessica doesn’t know what it means, but it has to be something significant. 

She steals a glance at her daemon from the corner of her eye, then looks away again. She’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to talk about it. Jessica’s not really in the mood herself, right now. So they walk the rest of the way in silence. 

Murdock doesn’t try to call again. 

Jessica tells herself it’s what she wanted. Meanwhile she and Cadmus continue not to talk about it, which honestly is probably for the best. It’s not like she has a great track record when it comes to helping her daemon with his feelings. It’s not like she knows what the hell to do with her own.

* * *

In the absence of other distractions, she gets more and more fixated on Reva Connor’s grieving widower. 

She learns that Luke Cage is slow to take offense but quick to end a barfight. He’s a dedicated business owner, always showing up to his shifts early and leaving late. And he likes to sleep around—but he’s not interested in married women, because his latest lover always takes off her wedding ring before stepping inside the bar. 

She talks her way into accessing the online state registry to look up his daemon, and learns that her name is Tamar and she’s not a polar bear, as Jessica had first thought, but a Kermode bear, _Ursus americanus kermodei_ —a rare white subspecies of the American black bear. Spirit bears, people sometimes call them. She’s striking, all right, always earning her share of second glances from Luke’s customers at the bar. Cadmus spends a lot of time staring at her in silence. 

So when Luke catches them snooping through the windows of his bar a couple weeks later and makes his offer—Ladies Night, that’s a good one—Jessica ignores the slimy feeling in the pit of her stomach, and stands there talking to him like the biggest asshole in the world. 

“Don’t do me any favors,” he says, after inviting her in, and Jessica doesn’t. She goes inside.

It’s a sick kind of thrill, sitting this close to him. She’s right up on a barstool where she can watch him work, serving drinks and taking orders with an easy competence that shouldn’t make heat flare inside her—but Jessica’s a real piece of work, and she knows it, because it does, it does. 

Cadmus sits on the stool next to her where he has a good view of the room. His eyes follow Tamar the same way Jessica’s track Luke, with a guilty twitch and shiver at their own brazenness. 

It’s not exactly rare for people with large daemons to move to the city, nowadays, but isn’t common either. City living gets trickier when your daemon is too big to ride the subway comfortably and crowds have to part in the narrow streets to avoid brushing up against a haunch or tail. Most workplaces are mandated to offer special accomodations, and there are plenty of regulations in place to require doors and elevators are built big enough for all but the most improbably massive of daemon shapes. But for a lot of people, it’s still more hassle than it’s worth. Those with the biggest daemons, tigers and lions and bears and shit, they usually wind up in rural areas, small towns with room to breathe.

People born and bred in big cities tend to have daemons who settle into smaller, more convenient shapes. The upper limit is usually around Cadmus’s size, a medium canine shape like Nelson’s border collie. So Jessica looks at the huge spirit bear trundling after Luke behind the bar, and she wonders. She hasn’t tried to go digging into Luke’s past—some last remaining scrap of decency stopped her hand, at least so far. But if she had to hazard a guess, she’d say that he probably isn’t from around here. It’d be surprising for someone with a daemon that big to have grown up in New Amsterdam proper. 

“Lot of booze for such a small woman,” he says, pouring her a double, and Jessica can’t stop the way her lips curl up at the corners, just a little, as she watches him.

“I don’t get asked on a lot of second dates.”

That surprises half a smile from the locked vault of his face. It makes Jessica feel warm and twisted-up inside, more buzzed than the amount of booze she’d drunk can account for, like she’s won some impossible prize when she’s watching him watch her with cagey interest in his dark eyes. She knows she should stop—stop drinking, stop talking, stop asking him questions about his life and his work and his past while Cadmus stares at his daemon across the bar and his daemon stares warily back—but she can’t.

That’s not true. She doesn’t, that’s all. She just sits there and lets him look at her like she’s a real person and not a lying piece of shit, lets him joke with her and ask about her work, even lets herself joke back, trying to make him like her because she’s the biggest piece of shit in the world and this is what she does.

“I’ve never seen a dive bar this clean,” she says. She can feel herself pushing closer and closer to the edge. “I don’t flirt, I just say what I want,” she says.

“And what do you want?”

Jessica licks her lips. “Come over here and maybe I’ll tell you.”

Luke’s smirk, when it finally comes, is fucking devastating. Moving slowly and deliberately, he puts down the towel and walks around to the end of the bar, holding her gaze the entire time. She can feel Cadmus holding his breath next to her. 

“Well?” Luke plants his feet in front of her, lips still curved in a smirk that should be illegal in all fifty states. 

Jessica stands up, curls a hand in the collar of his shirt, and kisses him. 

Luke’s hands are hot against the skin of her neck when he kisses back. She makes a low sound of approval and parts her lips, deepening the kiss—and then yelps and jerks backwards at the sharp flare of pain in her calf.

“Fuck!”

Cadmus snarls and bites down harder, teeth sunk cleanly through her jeans and into the tender flesh of the leg underneath. 

“Cadmus, what the hell,” she snaps, trying and failing to shake him free. “Knock it off!”

Cadmus’s growl grows louder. He finally removes his teeth from her leg long enough to glare up at her, blood shining red on his teeth as he speaks. “No.”

“Cadmus—“

“No,” he says again, the word low and vicious in his throat. “Stop it, Jessica.”

Jessica meets his glare with one of her own. She’s flushed and breathing hard, blood dripping down her calf to stain the torn fabric of her jeans. “You’re such an asshole.”

“You’re worse,” Cadmus says flatly, and she can’t exactly argue that point. 

“Uh, Jessica…?” 

Fuck. 

Letting her eyes shutter briefly closed, Jessica forces herself to turn around to meet Luke’s cautious gaze. He’s not making any effort to hide the confusion on his face—but what’s a million times worse is the edge of concern, like he thinks she’s someone worth worrying about, when Jessica has just pretty conclusively demonstrated that she’s not. 

“Sorry,” she grits out. “I…I have to go.”

“You sure?” He doesn’t move to close the distance between them, which is a blessing. Jessica’s not sure what she would do if he tried to touch her again. Punch herself in the face hard enough to break her own nose, maybe. Or worse, try for another kiss. Fuck.

“Yeah.” Running her forearm over her lips to wipe them dry, Jessica takes one slow, stumbling step backwards, and then another. She can feel Cadmus’s eyes following her as she goes. “This was a mistake. I—sorry.”

Luke doesn’t say anything else, just stands there and lets her leave, limping off into the dark with Cadmus at her side and shame stabbing like a hot poker in her chest. 

She starts trembling after she gets outside, and the shivers get worse the further she walks, as the shock of what she’d done—worse, what she’d almost done—sets in. Fuck. She kissed Luke. She let Luke kiss her back. She’d almost—they’d almost—fuck. Jessica is such a piece of shit.

“Are you alright?” Cadmus asks her after a while, as the cold night seeps in to her bones and Jessica’s limp gets more pronounced.

“Fine.”

Cadmus accepts her sullen reply with equally sullen silence, and they don’t talk again until they’re back at their apartment, and Jessica’s pulling out her battered first aid kit to clean up the bloody mess of her leg. Cadmus presses in close to watch her smear neosporin over the gashes, nose twitching as he breathes in the sharp antibiotic scent. Jessica’s not always great at reading her daemon, but tonight she knows exactly what he’s feeling, a messy tangle of guilt and anger and sea-deep self-loathing. She knows because she’s feeling the same thing.

“Hey, Cadmus,” she says after a while, keeping her head bent as she tapes a bandage over one of the deeper cuts. “Thanks.”

Cadmus breathes out raggedly. “You’re welcome,” he mutters. “Asshole.”

“Back at you,” she snorts, and somehow that’s the right thing to say, because Cadmus laughs.

* * *

Funnily enough, it’s not until the next day that everything goes truly and spectacularly to shit. 

She and Cadmus wake up to a phone call from an impatient client, Mrs. Slottman or whatever her name is, who hired them to find her missing daughter, and throw themselves sluggishly into their work. Jessica’s still limping, and her head is pounding from the amount of whiskey she imbibed trying to fall asleep the night before, but she does her best to stagger into action. 

She’s not at her sharpest, though, which must be why it takes her so long to catch on to the fact that she’s fucked. It’s not until she’s actually standing in front of the restaurant’s doors, tracking down a lead on the daughter, that she realizes she’s been there before. 

The name change threw her, but she gets the confirmation from the maître d’ to be sure, and yeah—this was the place, Il Rosso, the very same place. She’s been here before. She’s been here before, with _him_. 

She can feel her breathing speed up as they talk, see Cadmus’s tail start to twitch with nerves where he sits by the door, keeping an eye on the exits. Purple insect wings flash in the corner of her eye. 

_Then smile, Jessica._

Fuck. Hope Schlottman was here last Tuesday. Hope Schlottman was here with a companion, getting comped a $500 bottle of wine and eating—fuck, _fuck_ —classic Italian Pasta Amatriciana.

Jessica makes a break for the nearest door. 

Back on the street she’s panting for air, light-headed and panicking, trying to breathe but all she can see is purple, all she can hear is Kilgrave’s crisp, accented voice in her head—Main Street, Birch Street, Higgins Drive—fuck, this can’t be happening, this isn’t possible, not again—

“Birch Street,” she bites out, staggering like the drunk she is in the fresh air. “Higgins Drive—“

When Cadmus leaps up to sink his teeth into her arm, it comes as a relief. Letting the pain drag her back to the present, she sucks in a ragged breath and tries to think. But her thoughts go nowhere good.

“ _Shit_ ,” Cadmus says, releasing her, and all Jessica can do is agree. “It isn’t—it can’t be.”

“I know,” Jessica breathes. People on the sidewalk around them are staring and whispering, clearly disturbed by the freakish sight of a woman being attacked by her own daemon—but honestly they can think what the hell they want because Jessica and Cadmus have got bigger problems.

“They’re supposed to be _dead_.” The words come out half a howl. 

“I know.” Jessica closes her eyes shut tight and forces herself to suck in a fast lungful of air. “The Schlottmans,” she says. “We have to check—we have to be sure.”

Cadmus nods. Then they start to run. 

The Schlottmans confirm it, of course. A man at the police station referred them to her, not an officer. A man with an English accent and an insect daemon.

Kilgrave and Laelaps are alive. And they’ve come to take Jessica and Cadmus back.

Everything’s sort of a blur after that—dashing home to vomit into the toilet bowl, Cadmus dragging clothes into her suitcase while Jessica dials with shaking fingers, trying to order the plane ticket to Hong Kong—she tries to put it on Hope’s credit card because Jessica sure as shit doesn’t have the savings to pay for it, but of course Hope’s card gets declined, and of course Hogarth won’t give her the loan—which means there’s only one person she can ask, who might have the cash, and might be willing to give it to her. Fuck. 

* * *

“You could’ve used the door,” Trish tells her, the first time they see each other after six months apart. 

“I wasn’t sure you’d answer,” Jessica says. Trish’s eyes are soft and wary on her face, and the night breeze is cold in her hair. “It’s important.”

Bassanio stands on Trish’s shoulders, leaning forward to watch Cadmus where he’s slinking behind Jessica’s legs with his head down and his tail tucked flat against his rump. The mink daemon is just as long and silky and snow-white as she remembers, and Jessica’s foster sister is just as achingly herself, gold hair and blue eyes and angry, hurting mouth. 

Jessica tells her the truth: she needs money. She needs money because he’s back, and because she’s not going to let him take her again, not her and not Cadmus, and it’s not their goddamned PTSD talking, it’s the goddamned truth. She tells her about Hope Schlottman.

“So you’re running?” Bassanio asks her, like he can’t quite believe the question coming out of his mouth.

“We sure as hell are.” Cadmus hasn’t moved from behind her legs the whole time they’ve been standing here, and he leans up against her when Bassanio speaks, as if for comfort. “If he gets ahold of us again—“ She pressed her lips together hard, shaking her head.

“If you leave that girl with him—“

Jessica wants to grab Trish and shake her, to make her understand. But Trish doesn’t understand, and neither does Bassanio. They think they do, but they can’t. 

“Cadmus,” Bassanio says. “Cadmus, come on. You can’t mean it.”

But Cadmus just stays pressed up behind her, and won’t meet Bassanio’s eyes. Jessica can feel him trembling through her jeans. 

Eventually, Trish gets her the money.

* * *

But here’s the thing. Jessica and Cadmus have spent a lifetime with no one sticking around, no one looking out for them, no one who cares all that much what they do or why the fuck they do it—except for Trish and Bassanio. Trish’s voice has a way of worming itself inside Jessica’s head and then staying there. It’s almost creepy how good she is at making Jessica do shit she had absolutely no intention of doing. And apparently, sixth months isn’t long enough to make her lose her touch.

At least Jessica’s not alone in it. She can tell Bassanio has gotten to Cadmus too, in the set of his ears and frustrated flick of his tail where he sits next to her in the cab to the airport.

So in the end, Trish gets what she wants, even if she doesn’t know it. In the end, they try to play the hero one more time. 

“Hey,” she calls to the cabbie. “I’ve got make a stop at the Plaza Hotel.”

And he turns the car around.

So Jessica tries. She finds Hope stretched out the bed, her wild dog daemon all but catatonic at her side, and she and Cadmus try to help them. They drag the screaming girl and her howling daemon out of the hotel room, out of the hotel, take her back to their apartment and try to calm them down, give them some words to quiet the screaming in their heads, the screaming Jessica knows all to well. 

But it turns out to be another wrong call. Kilgrave was one step ahead of her, yet, again, and Hope’s parents end up dead. Hope ends up in jail, still screaming, their blood still wet on her hands. 

And Jessica and Cadmus—they end up making what’s probably the stupidest choice in a lifetime of truly, breathtakingly stupid choices, and instead of leaving poor little Hope Schlottman to her fate and fucking off to Hong Kong the way they patently should be—they decide to stay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're caught up to S1! I'm not a big fan of rewriting actual show dialogue word-for-word (except as little jokes like dropping Matt/Jess Defenders lines) - it's less fun to write, for one thing - but for the sake of plot consistency I felt like I had to do a little of that here...eventually the narrative will diverge enough that I won't need to keep doing it, but there's a bit of that next chapter as well, just fyi. 
> 
> a couple more daemon descriptions, for those of you who are like me and derive a strange but undeniable enjoyment from this stuff:
> 
> American mink: closely related to weasels and ferrets, minks are solitary and carnivorous; they hunt both on land and in the water to prey on fish and small mammals, and are a highly territorial, at times aggressive species; agile, clever, and opportunistic, minks are plentiful in the wild but are best known for those raised in captivity - often under cruel and inhumane conditions - to be killed for their highly prized fur, which is soft, glossy, and luxurious
> 
> kermode or spirit bear - as a subspecies of the American black bear, they are generally solitary animals, but will sometimes form breeding pairs or congregate together at feeding sites; curious and intelligent, they are unusually tolerant of other bears in their territory and can form complex and strikingly loyal social bonds; they are generally peaceful and non-aggressive bears, and are very unlikely to attack humans unless strongly provoked, such as protecting a mate or their cubs
> 
> capybara: the largest rodent in the world, these are peaceful, sociable herbivores who usually live together in large groups; males can show agression to each other when establishing dominance hierarchies, but females are highly cooperative and will care for each other’s young; with their calm, gentle temperaments, they’re notable for their unusual ability to get along well with other species of animals besides their own
> 
> I'll get into the specifics of the species of Matt's daemon eventually! (there's quite a few cobra subspecies out there and Philomena's is I think pretty interesting, but I don't want to get ahead of my own story)


	5. Chapter 5

The first thing that happens after deciding to stay is they get hauled in for questioning by the police, of fucking course. 

The second thing that happens is that, just as the tough-eyed cop with the red-crested woodpecker daemon who isn’t buying any of the bullshit she’s selling spreads Jessica’s illicit photos of Luke and Tamar out across the table ( _fuck_ ), the door to the interrogation room swings open. 

A familiar white cane taps through it. And who should follow it into the room but Matthew fucking Murdock.

“Ms. Jones,” he says, in his crispest, coldest, don’t-mess-with-me-I’m-a-goddamned-attorney-at-law voice, “Stop talking. This is over.”

Jessica stares at him. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

Philomena has wrapped herself tightly around his neck like a scaly red collar. Cadmus’s eyes dart up to her and then away. He’s been sitting on the floor at Jessica’s side with his head pressed against her leg, stock-still except for the nervous twitch of his tail and the faint trembling in his limbs that only Jessica can feel. Jessica has one hand scrunched up in his ruff, holding on probably just a little too hard, but the point of contact is comforting to both of them. 

“Officer Clemons, good to see you again,” Murdock says instead of answering her. 

“Mr. Murdock,” the detective replies, a little sourly. “Likewise. I take it you’re here to interfere with another one of my investigations?”

“If by interefere you mean vigorously defend the legal rights of my client, then yes.” Murdock summons up one of his guileless little smiles, somehow managing to radiate both devout Catholicism and an expensive Ivy League law degree with a single twitch of his lips. Philomena lets out a soft hiss of agreement, and the woodpecker daemon chirps her irritation from Clemons’s shoulder. 

Biting hard on her lip, Jessica looks down to meet Cadmus’s golden eyes. She can tell that he’s thinking the same thing as her. It’s not a complicated thought, really—in fact, it can be pared pretty easily down to a single word. 

Shit. 

Jessica doesn’t want or need Matthew fucking Murdock to defend her legal rights. The problem is, her mind has already jumped to a certain bloodstained blonde in a nearby holding cell who does. 

So she doesn’t immediately tell Murdock to get lost after he’s cleared Clemons from the interrogation room and settled into the chair across from her. Instead, she smooths her fingers along Cadmus’s ear and gives him a hard stare. Not that Murdock can tell—or, shit, maybe he can. She has no idea how much or little he can see, not anymore. 

“My attorney, huh,” she says into the silence. “I don’t remember hiring you.”

Murdock’s face is a lot harder to read than she remembers. Or maybe it always was, and she’s just noticing now. “My legal firm has a proud tradition of taking on cases pro bono.”

“So you’re doing this for free, is what you’re saying.”

“That’s correct.”

“Why?” she asks bluntly.

“I think you know the answer to that, Ms. Jones.”

Jessica really doesn’t, actually, but she’s got bigger problems right now, so the mystery of Murdock and his incomprehensible life choices will have to wait. “Whatever,” she says. “Can you make them give me back my photos?” If she’s managed to screw over Luke on top of everything else in the current shitshow of her life, Jessica doesn’t know what she’ll do. Cry like a little girl, maybe, or just give up and bash her head through a wall.

“I’ll try. Technically your apartment can be interpreted as part of the crime scene, but they’re certainly stretching the definition as far any judge will be concerned.”

“I don’t care about the judge,” Jessica grinds out. “I just don’t want to cause that guy in the pictures any more trouble, okay?”

“ _More_ trouble?” Murdock repeats delicately. 

“Yeah.”

Murdock waits, but Jessica isn’t going to give him anything else, and eventually he catches on. “Well, Ms. Jones—“

“Look,” Jessica says, hard and fast, “You and I both know the cops don’t have anything to hold me on. I was getting out of here with or without your help, so don’t expect me to get down on my knees in gratitude any time soon.”

Murdock’s lips twitch. “I assure you, the thought never crossed my mind.”

“But,” Jessica keeps going, bulling ahead before she can wimp out and change her mind, “There is something that I—that you can do.” Her shoulders hunch up as she talks, discomfort crawling in little insect legs down her spine at what she’s about to say. 

“Oh?” Murdock’s voice is careful, not giving anything away. “And what’s that?”

“Take Hope Schlottman’s case.”

At that, his eyebrows fly up, a look of real surprise crossing his face. “The girl who just killed both her parents in cold blood?”

“It wasn’t—“ Jessica breaks off, shaking her head and grimacing as she tries to collect her thoughts. “It wasn’t in cold blood. She…it’s not her fault.”

“What do you mean, it’s not her fault?”

“I mean she didn’t want to do it,” Jessica snaps. “Someone made her.”

“Someone made her,” Murdock repeats, sounding dubious. “You mean, like…blackmailed her?” If Jessica were in a more forgiving mood, she’d understand his skepticism, but as it is she just tenses up even further, knotting her hand so tightly in Cadmus’s fur that he winces and makes a small sound of protest. 

“Shit—“ Jessica loosens her hold at once. “Sorry, Cadmus, I didn’t mean to—“ Biting down on her lip again, hard enough to draw blood this time, Jessica stops and forces herself to breath. “Not blackmail. Look, Murdock, just talk to her, would you? She’ll explain what happened. She’ll tell you the truth.”

Murdock is leaning slightly forward in his chair while Philomena’s tongue flickers restlessly in and out of her mouth. “Jessica,” he says, and his voice is that special kind of careful that Jessica hates, the same kind of careful that Trish used to speak to her in, that made her realize she had to move out. “Are you alright?”

It’s enough to wring a bitter little laugh from her throat. “Never better.”

“Your wrist is bleeding.” 

Jessica glances down, surprised, to realize he’s right—Cadmus’s bite marks from earlier have opened up again, though she has to tug back her sleeve to see them. “Just a scrape,” she mutters, wondering how in the hell Murdock could tell from all the way across the table.

“Your heartbeat is elevated,” he adds, the words almost clinical as he goes on. “Your hands are shaking, your blood glucose levels have spiked, and the cortisol in your system is sky high. You’ve also been awake for at least twenty four hours, and you haven’t eaten anything since you threw up your lunch about six hours ago.” Jessica jerks back in her chair, her eyes going wide, because what the actual fuck? But Murdock isn’t done yet. “You’re scared, Jessica. Tell me why.”

_Tell me, Jessica—_

There’s a flash of purple in the corner of her eye, and Jessica flinches and turns to face it so fast she nearly topples from the chair. Cadmus gives a startled yip as she moves, skittering back from the table to give her room to maneuver, to run—

But of course nothing’s there. Jessica swears under her breath and swipes a hand over her eyes, feeling it tremble. 

When she composes herself enough to look back at Murdock, his mouth is tight and his eyebrows are drawn down low over his glasses. Philomena has started shifting around his neck, the dark red coils of her body winding and unwinding as her head lifts up, tail lashing, to swallow Jessica and Cadmus in her inky black gaze. “Jessica,” he says again, lower and more urgent than before, “I know you have no reason to trust me. But if someone is…is threatening you, I can help. You know who I am, what I’m capable of—“

Jessica thinks of Kilgrave with his greedy hands on someone as dangerous as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, and her blood runs cold. “No,” she says quickly—too quickly, if Murdock’s skeptical expression is anything to go by. “No, no one’s threatening me, I don’t need—that kind of help.” She swallows hard against the lump in her throat. “I told you, Murdock, I can take care of myself. What I need is for you to defend Hope.” 

Because who else is she ever going to convince to take a case this hopeless? She’ll try Hogarth if she has to, but she knows what the woman will say—Hogarth doesn’t like losing, and Hope Schlottman has hopeless cause written all over her. Who else is going to help her, if not the bleeding heart lawyers of Nelson and Murdock?

Murdock leans back in his chair. The look on his face is calculating. “I’ll talk to her,” he says at last. “I can’t make a decision until then.”

“Fine.” That seems like the best she’s going to get, at least for now. “Then we’re done here. Am I free to go, Counsellor?”

He gives a slight, jerky nod. “Of course. After you, Ms. Jones.” 

He even opens the door for her, the asshole. Jessica marches through with her back straight, jamming her hands into her pockets to hide the way they shake. Cadmus slinks after with his nose low to the ground, sniffing the tiles suspiciously as they walk.

The sun has risen by the time they step outside of the precinct into the street. The first place she and Cadmus head is Luke’s bar, for damage control. The cops are already there, which is just her luck—and thanks a lot for that, Murdock, nice to see that fancy law degree put to work—and Luke isn’t exactly pleased to see her. She spins a quick story about a case to explain the photos, which he at least seems to buy, though it doesn’t do much to improve his opinion of her nonexistent moral fiber.

“So that night,” he says, “It was all just part of your job?”

“I—shouldn’t have done that.”

He watches her closely. Behind him, Tamar does the same, shifting her pale bulk from paw to paw. “That why your daemon bit you?” he asks. “Because it’s messed up?”

“That…it doesn’t matter.” Jessica sighs, looking away from his penetrating gaze. It absolutely is messed up, just not for the reason he thinks. “I’m sorry I…” Kissed you, stalked you, murdered your wife? “Got you mixed up in this. I’ve got a lawyer who’ll make sure the cops don’t bother you again.”

“Get out of here,” he says finally, after a long, uncomfortable pause. “Stay the hell away from me.”

“I…yeah.” That’s obviously the best thing for both of them—and especially for Luke—even if it makes something in her chest clench up small and tight to hear the words. Jessica drags a hand through her hair, throws one last glance behind her, and slinks toward the door with her metaphorical tail between her metaphorical legs. Cadmus helpfully literalizes the metaphor with his own tail as he runs ahead.

* * *

Back at her apartment, the first thing she does is take a hot shower. It’s been a long, sleepless night, and it’s about to be a long, sleepless day. She’s at least going to spend it smelling like cheap almond shampoo instead of her own vomit, dried sweat and fear.

She braces her hands against the wall as the steaming water pounds into her back, trying not to think about anything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours. If she lets herself process it, she’s going to break—she’ll wind up either catatonic under the bed or screaming and punching through walls for the next day, and neither of those things are going to stop Kilgrave or prove Hope’s innocence. So processing will have to wait. 

She dries off fast, yanks on a fresh tanktop and her last pair of clean jeans, and makes a half-hearted effort to comb some of the knots out of her hair. The idea of food makes her stomach churn uneasily, so she sticks to a liquid breakfast, draining the last of the jack in her office and opening a new bottle to refill her hip flash before she sets out. She’s got a feeling she’s going to need all of it to get her through the day.

She and Cadmus trade a glance before they head out to the door. 

Her daemon looks about as shitty as she feels, wild-eyed and twitchy, with a nervous tremor in his ears and a tail that won’t stop flicking back and forth through the air. His fur’s gone all scruffy and clumped in patches, and Jessica frowns as she kneels to face him, running a careful hand over the coarse hair along his back. She doesn’t ask if he’s okay, because the answer is obviously no. She just lowers her head to press her forehead up against his own, and drags in a slow, deep breath. Cadmus mirrors her. 

“We can still run,” he says. His voice is hoarse. 

“We can,” Jessica agrees, equally quiet. “Do you think we should?”

Cadmus sighs raggedly. “No.”

“Yeah.” She lets her shoulders slump, huffing half a laugh at the word. “Me neither.”

“We’re really fucking stupid, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Jessica says again. “Yeah, I know.”

She can feel him trembling against her. “I don’t want him to touch me again,” Cadmus whispers, his voice cracking, and something inside Jessica cracks along with it at the sound.

“I won’t let him,” she hisses, wrapping her hands around Cadmus’s shoulders and holding on fiercely. “Cadmus, I swear. He’s never touching either of us again. We’ll do whatever it takes.”

“Whatever it takes,” Cadmus repeats, the words fragile in his mouth.

“Whatever it takes.” 

The gravity of that promise sinks into her bones and stays there, heavy with everything left unspoken between them. Whatever it takes, Jessica thinks, and swallows. 

When she and Cadmus get back to the station to see Hope, Jessica finds Murdock and Philomena leaving just as she’s heading to sign in and collect her visitor’s badge. 

“Murdock.” She greets him with a wary jerk of her head.

“Jessica.”

“What happened to Ms. Jones?”

His mouth works, irritated, as he steps in closer to speak. “I just finished my interview with Hope Schlottman.”

Jessica’s shoulders go taut, instantly alert. “Oh yeah? So have you decided yet?”

“Yes,” he says, and takes a moment to drag it out, the asshole. “I’m willing to take her case.” Jessica tries to hide the relieved rush of her breath at the words, but at this point, she’s pretty sure it’s a wasted effort. “On one condition,” he adds, and she braces herself, grimacing.

“What’s that?”

“I need you to help me build the defense.”

She breathes out. “Yeah, okay,” she says, as if she’s doing him a favor and hadn’t been planning the same thing all along. 

“It’s not going to be easy. Hope’s story is…pretty hard to believe. I’m not sure how it’s going to play in front of a jury.”

“But you believe her?” Jessica asks, the words racing after each other too fast from her mouth. “You believe she’s telling the truth?”

Murdock reaches up with one hand to stroke the scales along Philomena’s head. “I do,” he says quietly. At her side, Cadmus lets out a soft huff and rubs up against her leg. 

Thank you, Jessica thinks despite herself, but the words catch inside her throat and threaten to choke her when she considers saying it out loud. She and Murdock still aren’t square, whatever the fuck else is going on in her sorry excuse for a life. Instead she crosses her arms and looks away from his pale, smudged face. “Good,” she says. “Because she is.”

“We’re going to need to talk about how you know that,” he tells her flatly. “If I’m going to do this, Ms. Jones,” and the say he says her name is almost acidic, folding like a switchblade around each syllable, “If you want Hope to have any chance at a successful defense, then I have to know everything about this case. No more secrets.”

Jessica sneers at him. “You’re one to talk about secrets.”

“Yes, I am.” He leans his head towards hers, stepping in close enough to put her instantly on edge. “I know all about them. I know how hard it is to let them go. And I know that right now, your secrets are putting my client at risk of multiple life sentences in prison.”

God, Murdock is such an unbearable, arrogant—perceptive asshole. Jessica doesn’t know how the hell she ever got along with him before. “Fine,” she grits out. “But not here.”

He nods. “My office. Noon.” He finally backs off, turning away towards the street as he prepares to leave. “Don’t be late.”

“Whatever,” she mutters, watching him go. “What a dick,” she tells Cadmus as they head inside. Cadmus gives a tired yip that she chooses to interpret as agreement. 

Hope looks washed-out and exhausted in her blue scrubs when they sit down to talk in the visitor’s room. Her daemon Pindarus, an underfed African wild dog with a patchwork coat, is curled up shuddering in her lap, even though he’s much too big to comfortably fit. Hope has both hands clutching at him like a lifeline as they talk. 

Jessica’s hoping to get information from the girl, details about where Kilgrave’s been, what he wants, how he survived. But Hope just clams up at her questions.

“You talked to the lawyer before me, right?” Jessica tries a different angle. “Matthew Murdock?” Hope nods silently. “Yeah, he’s helping me with your case. He’s good at what he does, you can—you can trust him. But we need to know as much as we can, Hope.”

“Are you a good jumper?” Hope says instead, and Cadmus can’t hide his whine in time. “He said we were never as good as you,” she tells Jessica, and Jessica’s stomach twists with nausea at the empty sound of Hope’s voice, at the empty gleam of her daemon’s dull brown eyes. “But we could stretch further apart.”

Jessica tastes bile in her mouth. “Did he make you and Pindarus…do that a lot? See how far you could go from each other?”

“Only when he was mad,” Pindarus says hollowly. Jessica doesn’t need to ask to know how easily Kilgrave can lose his temper. She remembers just fine.

“Did he touch you?” At the sound of Cadmus’s voice, Jessica jerks in her chair to stare at him, startled. But Cadmus isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at Pindarus. 

“Sometimes,” Pindarus whispers. 

Cadmus snarls softly at the answer, and Jessica reaches out to stroke a hand along his head. “Hope, I—“ 

“My brother,” Hope says, “Is all alone now. He’s twelve.”

“It’s not your fault.” Trish used to tell her that, all the time, in those first weeks and months after her escape. Sometimes it even helped, a little. Sometimes, Jessica even believed her. 

“I know.” Hope’s glassy gaze fixes on Jessica, and she can almost see the cracks behind her pupils, a faultline of madness running right through. It’s like looking in a mirror. “It’s yours.” Jessica flinches, hard, but Hope keeps going. “He said you left him there to die. You should have stayed. To make sure.”

“So he’s mad.” Jessica latches on to that, desperate for any scrap of information she can use. “He wants to make me suffer.”

“Yes,” Pindarus says. “Like he suffered.”

“How? How did he suffer? From the accident? Is he injured? Hope, I need to know so I can stop him—“

“No! He’ll control you—he’ll make you do things, terrible things—“

“I won’t let him,” Jessica promises, trying to fill her voice with all the confidence she doesn’t feel. “Hope, I promise. I won’t let him control me.”

Hope stares at her. Pindarus is clawing at her lap, agitated, a low whine trembling in the back of his throat. Cadmus is all but vibrating with tension at Jessica’s side. 

“You should kill yourself,” the girl says, like a benediction, and Jessica’s hand tightens in Cadmus’s fur. She can feel him go still at the words. 

“Probably,” she says at last, flat and hard and honest. Beneath her hand, Cadmus flinches. “But I’m the only one who can prove you’re innocent.” Then she gets up to go.

Hope and Pindarus’s strangled sobs follow them out of the room.

* * *

Jessica and Cadmus show up at Murdock’s office fifteen minutes late and a couple sheets to the wind. She’s not all the way to drunk, she hasn’t had near enough whiskey for that—but on a totally empty stomach, the few gulps she’s had to keep her going start to add up fast. 

Karen and Nelson both do a terrible job of pretending not to stare when she walks inside. Apparently Murdock warned them she was coming, because they don’t look surprised, exactly, just fundamentally unsettled by the sight of her return. Which Jessica gets—she feels the same way.

“Ms. Jones,” Murdock greets her at the door with Philomena wound neatly around his shoulders. “You’re late.”

Jessica only jerks her head at him, unimpressed by the scolding teacher act. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

He sniffs at her, his nose scrunching as he breathes in the whiskey fumes. “Are you drunk?”

“What is this, twenty questions?” She steps away from him, scowling. “You told me to come in and give you answers, so I came. Now do you actually want them, or do you think we should waste a few more hours standing here and running a breathalyzer first?”

Murdock doesn’t look all that amused by her scintillating wit, but he at least gestures for her to join him in the conference room without wasting her time with any more pointless chitchat. He locks the door behind them before seating himself at the table across from her. 

Jessica braces her elbows against the cool plastic surface. She feels queasy and overheated, off-balance in the harsh florescent lights of the room, and that last swallow of whiskey is sitting uncomfortably in her stomach. But it’s time to focus, so she tries to sit up straight and blink the purple from the edges of her sight. She can’t afford to be off her game now. 

“So, Ms. Jones—“

“Would you cut the ‘Ms. Jones’ shit already, Murdock?” Great, less than five minutes in and her temper’s already starting to fray. She just hates the way it sounds in his mouth, so polite. It’s such bullshit. 

There’s the beginning of an angry flush on Murdock’s face when he replies. “I was under the impression you didn’t care for the informality, Jessica. Make up your mind—you’re the one who told me to leave you alone. I haven’t heard from you in over a month—“

“Well boo hoo, my friend found out I was lying to her and faking a disability, so she cut me off, that’s a real sob story.”

“Oh, were we friends?” Murdock asks, dangerously mild. Philomena shifts around his neck, tightening and loosening her gleaming coils. “You never said. You’re the one who kept refusing to call me Matt.”

“Oh fuck you, _Matt,_ ” Jessica snarls. “Are you seriously going to sit there and act like you’ve got the moral high ground here? One of the people in this room literally has a secret crime-fighting identity, and newsflash asshole, it isn’t me.”

Matt—no, _Murdock_ , fuck him, he can’t tell her what name to call him by—opens his mouth to reply. His glasses slip down the bridge of his nose to reveal a hard light glittering in his unfocused brown eyes. But then Philomena hisses something quiet into his ear, and he hesitates, throat bobbing as he swallows. “Look, Jessica,” he says at last, in a different tone of voice. “You…you have every right to be upset with me.”

“You bet your ass I do.”

“But,” he goes on stubbornly, “For Hope’s sake, we’re going to have to find a way to work together. Because the two of us? We’re her only shot.” 

Jessica breathes out raggedly, knowing he’s right and hating it. “Fine.” She curls her fingernails into her palms, digging hard into the skin, then deliberately lets them relax. “Just—ask your questions, Murdock, let’s get this over with.”

“Alright,” Murdock says, brushing a strand of loose hair from his forehead. Somehow he’s already managed to regain his composure. It’s some kind of creepy lawyer juju, maybe—or just creepy Matt Murdock juju, because that’s fast seeming like it’s going to need a whole category of its own. He shuffles through the files in front of him, running a finger quickly across a line of braille. “I got the basics of Hope’s personal history from her this morning, but I’ll need to go back for a longer interview soon. It sounds like she was doing well at NYU before…all of this. Bright student athlete, a loving family, living at college with her best friend. Then all of that went out the window when she met this…Kilgrave.”

Jessica tries not to tense up at the sound of his name, but Murdock’s head tilts towards her anyway, as if he somehow—heard the motion, if that’s even possible. Fuck, maybe it is. Make that one more for the creepy Murdock juju bingo card.

“I got the sense from Hope’s testimony,” he says carefully, like someone walking across a highware, inching forward one cautious step at a time, “That she believes you’re also acquainted with this man.” Jessica starts to bite her lip, stops, then reaches out blindly for Cadmus instead. He noses his head up to her lap, letting her tangle her hand in his fur. “Is that assumption correct?”

“Yes.”

Something cold ripples across Murdock’s face at the admission, there and then gone in a blink, so fast Jessica’s half-convinced she imagined the vicious slant of his mouth. “I see,” is all he says, in his mildest tones. “Can you tell me more about the nature of your relationship with Mr. Kilgrave?”

Jessica swallows. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“Jessica, I’m trying to build a case around Miss Schlottman’s frankly extraordinary claim that a man with supernatural powers kidnapped her and forced her to shoot her parents against her will.” The words are surprisingly patient. “I’m going to need every detail I can possibly dig up on this Kilgrave in order to plan a legal defense of this story. And right now, you’re the only person besides Hope who seems to know anything about him.”

Jessica can feel herself breathing too fast, her pulse thudding too loud in her ears. But she tries to keep a lid on it, scraping hair back from her face and stroking her hand across the soft fur of Cadmus’s ears. “I doubt I can tell you anything Hope can’t.” Her own voice sounds thin and brittle in her ears, a thread stretched too tight.

Setting one hand flat against the table, Murdock reaches up with his other to take off his glasses, thens leans towards her with his mouth twisting and his eyes creased. “Jessica,” he starts, but then his own daemon cuts him off.

“Please, Jessica.” Philomena’s tail lashes as she speaks, and Jessica starts at the sound of her voice. Cadmus jerks under hand, his own head shooting up to stare at the snake across the table. “We need to know.”

Finally, Jessica drops her eyes and gives a jerky, reluctant nod. “He—used his powers on me.” The words slice like knives in her throat. “The same as with Hope. He can control people, somehow. With his voice. Whatever he says, you…have to do. You _want_ to do it, even…even if you don’t.”

When Murdock speaks again, his voice is as soft as she’s ever heard it. “What did he make you do, Jessica?”

“Ask me something else,” she bites out. 

“Jessica—“

“No, Matt,” she says, flat and hard and furious. She’s not going to tell him that. She can’t. “Ask me something else.”

“Alright,” he says, the same way you’d gentle a rearing horse, all steadiness and forced calm. “Alright.” He reaches out to type something on his open laptop. “Can you tell me how long you were under his control?”

“Eight months.”

Murdock’s fingers falter for a second on the keyboard, then start typing again. Philomena lets out a low hiss at the words. But when he speaks again, his voice is even. “And do you know of anyone else, besides yourself and Hope, who would be able to testify to having been…controlled by him?”

“I—no.” Jessica hesitates. “But that’s a good idea. If we could find more witnesses…”

Murdock flashes her a strained half-smile. “I’ll put Foggy on it.”

She looks away. “Right.”

“Crafting a reasonable argument that this Kilgrave person exists is going to be hard,” Murdock says, “But I don’t think it’s impossible. Hope’s a young, female first offender, with no history of criminal behavior—if we get her up on the stand, she’ll make a sympathetic defendant. She’s got a chance, Jessica.”

But Jessica’s already shaking her head. “Don’t bullshit me, Murdock,” she says tiredly. “I know it’s not enough. We need solid evidence.”

He leans back in his chair, attention fixed squarely on her. “What did you have in mind?”

“Kilgrave.” Fuck, Jessica thinks, as soon as the name leaves her mouth. She knows she’s right, but it’s the first time she’s had to come right out and say it. She rubs her temples wearily. “I have to find him. Film him, somehow, get a recording of him using his powers—he’s too dangerous for the police, but if I can—“

“Jessica,” Murdock says, “Forgive my saying this, but—if he’s too dangerous for the police, don’t you think he might also be too dangerous for you?”

Jessica laughs. “No shit.”

“Jessica,” he prompts, the irritation in his voice edged with concern.

“Of course it’s dangerous. But he’s coming for me anyway. Besides, I’m the closest thing to a Kilgrave expert there is—and I’m one of the only people who even believes he exists.” Jessica might make a sorry excuse for a hero, but at the moment, she’s all they’ve got. “It has to be me.”

But Murdock’s face has gone still. “What do you mean he’s coming for you anyway?” 

Sighing, Jessica smooths her hand down Cadmus’s back, feeling his shallow breaths. “That’s what Hope told me.” She would have known it either way, but there’s no reason to bring that up right now.

“I see.” He gives up on the pretense of taking notes, pushing his laptop away to curl a hand lightly around Philomena’s long neck. “Jessica,” he says seriously, “I’m sorry for lying to you. Do you believe that?”

Jessica eyes him dubiously, unsure where this turn in the conversation came from. “I guess.” She does believe it, sort of. It’s just that she also believes he’d start lying again in half a second if he thought he could get away with it and that it was for her own good, or some total and utter bullshit like that.

“Good.” His lips curl up in a quick, reflexive twitch. “I understand why you might be reluctant to trust me again. But from what I can make of this situation, your life is in clear and present danger. You know what I’m capable of. Let me help you.” 

“What the hell do you think I’m doing sitting here in your office?” Jessica asks with a snort.

“I don’t mean with the case,” he says steadily. “I mean with Kilgrave. I can help you take him down.”

“No, you can’t,” Jessica tells him, every bit as unyielding. “Jesus, Murdock, this isn’t about trust.” She definitely doesn’t trust him, but that’s almost beside the point right now. “I’ve read the papers, Devil-boy. I’ve watched the news. I know what you can do.”

His face tightens. “Then why—“ 

She leans forward. “Now imagine everything you can do—all the violence, the weapons, even that weird shit where you smell people’s cortisol levels or whatever—imagine all of that in the hands of a murdering psychopath with no limits and no capacity for remorse.” She sits there, staring at him, willing him to understand. “You’re way too dangerous to get within a hundred yards of his powers, Murdock. I’ve heard the Daredevil never kills. You want to keep that streak? Then stay far away Kilgrave.” She sneers a little, remembering, a faint echo of Kilgrave’s voice ringing in her head. “He has a thing about people with powers.” 

“You mean people like you?”

Jessica’s eyes snap back to Murdock’s face. For a moment she just looks at him, wary and hard, but all Murdock does is sit there with his head tilted, innocent as a newborn lamb. Yeah fucking right. “What gave it away?” she says at last.

He smiles a little. “You did. Just now.”

“Murdock,” she growls.

He holds up a hand, still smiling. “The way you kicked that criminal halfway across the alley was my first clue. How strong are you, really?”

Jessica rolls her eyes, then shrugs a little and squares her shoulders, the itch of a grin tugging at one corner of her mouth. Hell, if he’s so curious, why not? It’s not like he can blackmail her with the information, not with all the secrets she’s got over him now. “Hold onto your laptop,” she says, and waits just long enough for Murdock to grab hold of it before she reaches out and lifts the table a few feet into the air with one hand.

Murdock lets out a low whistle. Feeling weirdly flushed, Jessica sets the table back down, glancing away from his impressed face and into Cadmus’s yellow eyes. Cadmus blinks up at her, his own mouth slanted in a matching, wolfish half-grin. He looks like he knows something she doesn’t. Jessica frowns at him and swings her gaze back to Murdock instead. 

“So you could see that,” she says skeptically. He clearly _had_ , she’s not doubting that part—it’s just so strange to think about. “How does that even work?”

“I really am blind,” he says, answering the question she hadn’t asked first. “But my—my other senses are enhanced. It’s a…different kind of seeing.”

“Huh.”

“Jessica, my point is—we’re both gifted, or whatever you want to call it. It seems like Kilgrave could do just as much damage by controlling you—“

And just like that, Jessica’s humor drains away. “I’m done with this conversation.”

“Jessica—“

“I came here to talk about Hope’s case, Murdock, not rehash pointless arguments with a guy whose idea of a good time is running around at night beating people up in his long johns.”

Murdock clenches his jaw. “Fine,” he says tightly. “Let’s talk about the case.” The unspoken ‘for now’ hangs pretty obviously in the air.

She can tell he’s not done rehashing this particular argument, not by a long shot—but if he’s at least willing to drop it for now, Jessica will take it. She’s starting to run out of energy for biting his head off. It’s like he keeps growing it back, no matter how many times she does. Guess that makes one more for the creepy juju bingo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh man you guys, it sure has been a week (month, year, four years, uh life I guess)...not to get political on main but I think it might actually be...over? idk are good things still allowed to happen in this world? signs may ludicrously point to yes
> 
> anyway even with the happy ending my nerves may have been permanently shattered by the last few days and I lack the emotional energy to reply to everyone's generous comments at the moment - but I will try to get to them in the future! in the meantime thank you all for taking the time to come talk to me and say nice things about this weird little fic, I appreciate you immensely and always read your thoughts with great pleasure and interest, the kindness of strangers on the internet is really lovely and heartwarming sometimes


	6. Chapter 6

Trish tracks her down at her apartment later that day, Bassanio wrapped like a fine white scarf around her neck. It reminds Jessica briefly of Matt and Philomena, which makes her scowl before turning her attention to Trish’s face.

Then she sighs. “Guess you’d better come in,” she says, swinging open the door, and Trish steps inside, glancing curiously around the room as she does. The papered-over broken window of her door gets an especially sharp glance, but before Trish can ask about it Jessica speaks first. “So what are you doing here?”

“I tried to call you. Like, a lot.” Trish’s voice is soft, a little reproachful and a little relieved, as if it’s enough just to see Jessica’s face to make up for all the missed calls. Jessica tries not to flinch from the anxious, searching look in her eyes.

“My phone died.”

Trish nods, taking this in with nothing but an unsurprised twist of her mouth. “I thought you were leaving town.”

“I was. I…” Jessica looks across the room at Cadmus, who’s sitting by the door with his ears pricked forward, listening quietly. “We changed our minds.”

“Jessica—“ For someone who just got her way—she was literally begging Jessica to do exactly this just last night—Trish doesn’t look too happy about it. Neither does Bassanio, who’s squirming off Trish’s shoulder and into her arms, making little squeaks of distress as he does. She hugs him close to her chest and meets Jessica’s darting eyes. “I’m scared for you.”

“Don’t be,” Jessica bites out. “Don’t—have feelings, Trish. Okay?”

“Not okay,” Bassanio says, outraged. 

“You need help,” Trish adds, coming closer to the desk Jessica’s dodged behind to shield herself from her foster sister’s too-clear eyes. “Jessica—“

Hunching her shoulders, Jessica looks down to yank open a drawer of her desk and pull out the envelope of plane-ticket-money Trish had given to her the night before. She holds it wordlessly out to Trish, who gives her a cold stare in response.

“You’re not trying to be insulting, but you’re succeeding.”

“It’s not an insult,” Jessica says stiffly. “It’s the cash I owe you.”

Trish makes her stand there and try not to squirm under her stare a few seconds longer before finally taking it back.

“So now what, with Kilgrave?”

Jessica sighs. “The accident didn’t kill him, but he took a hit. I think if I can find his weakness, I can find him.”

“So you find him, then what?”

“I don’t know.” Jessica does her best not to snap, but it’s hard. She and Cadmus already know that they’re making all this shit up as they go along—she didn’t expect to have to explain it to anyone else. “I—find him, I prove that girl’s innocent, he goes away.” It sounds like a fairy tale coming out of her mouth, even to Jessica. 

Unsurprisingly, Trish isn’t convinced. “Or he controls you again.”

Jessica doesn’t flinch, but it’s a close thing. “I’ll die before I let that happen,” she says, with total honesty. She and Cadmus both. She already promised him that. Whatever it takes.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Trish hisses back. 

“There has to be another way,” Bassanio adds urgently. 

Looking like he’s being unwillingly dragged at the end of an invisible rope, Cadmus has spent the last minute edging across the room towards the conversation. Now Bassanio hops from Trish’s arms to Jessica’s desk, and from there to the floor, so that he can go running right up to sniff at Cadmus where he’s standing stiff-legged and tense by the wall. 

“Cadmus,” the mink daemon says. “Cadmus, just listen.”

Cadmus’s ear press flat to his head, but for once, he doesn’t snarl or back away. It’s like Kilgrave’s return has shaken loose some of his defense mechanisms, shocked him to his foundations so thoroughly that none of the old instinct are working quite the way they should. Jessica doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one.

“Cadmus,” Bassanio says again. 

Something deep in Jessica’s chest hurts to listen to him, the stubborn way he says her daemon’s name, the familiar timbre of his quick light voice. It brings back memories of the million times he’s called for Cadmus before—as teenagers, when Bassanio hadn’t settled yet and would tease Cadmus by flitting from shape to shape, birds and butterflies and mountain lions every other second—as stupid early twenty-somethings, getting drunk and making fun of Trish’s growing string of exes, the two daemons curled up together on the couch beside them, Bassanio snug in the crook of Cadmus’s legs—

“Listen,” Trish says, “Jessica. I think you should move in with me again. I have a security system, a doorman, an actual lock on my door—“

Forcibly tearing herself free from the memories, Jessica gives her head a sharp shake. “You think I’ll be safe there?” Anger and weariness mix together in her tone, and though neither emotion is Trish’s fault, it’s hard not to take it out on her. “I’m not safe anywhere. Every corner I turn, I don’t know what’s on the other side, I don’t know who Kilgrave’s gotten to. It could be a doorman, it could be a cabbie who’s gonna drive me to the east river, it—it could be a talk show host who was my best friend.”

“Was?” Trish asks, quiet, cold. 

Jessica takes a deep breath, and looks the only person in the world who she loves square in the eyes. “I’m life-threatening, Trish,” she says. “Steer clear of me.”

“I don’t do that,” Trish says flatly.

She closes her eyes, and swallows her pride. “Please.” Cadmus makes a sound at the word, too sharp for a whine, too soft for a growl. “I can’t risk you.”

When she opens her eyes, Bassanio is standing in front of her daemon, his long, sleek neck stretched out to lean his head towards Cadmus. For a few quiet seconds, Cadmus just watches him, not moving. Then, very slowly, he leans forward as well, until the tips of their noses brush up against each other. 

“Cadmus,” Bassanio says again. 

“Bassanio,” Cadmus says, “Don’t.” Then he pulls abruptly away. 

So apparently Cadmus is talking to people besides Jessica again. If the circumstances were any different, she’d throw a fucking party. As it is, she’ll have to settle for the expression on Trish’s face. 

It’s a pretty good second place prize.

“You should go,” she says, before the moment gets too out of hand and someone does something crazy like cry or try to talk about their feelings, Christ. 

“Yeah,” Trish says softly, angry and stubborn and still not buying any of Jessica’s bullshit. No one seems to be in the market for it lately. “Yeah, okay.” She pauses to look one last time around Jessica’s shitty apartment. “Your place is cute, by the way.”

Jessica almost has to bite back a smirk. “You think it’s a dump.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know your voice.”

Trish looks at her one last time, unsmiling, and turns to go. Bassanio skitters after her, hooking his claws into her coat to scramble up her back and onto her shoulder as she steps out the door. Jessica and Cadmus sit quietly for a minute, listening to Trish’s footsteps fade down the hall.

…

Jessica and Cadmus spend the rest of the day trying to track down a lead on Kilgrave. They visit the hospital that’s closest to the street where he’d been hit by a bus all those months ago, the Metro General, and Jessica manages to fib her way into getting her hands on a file that lists the two ambulances dispatched to the area. One of the drivers, Jack Denton, went missing at the scene of the accident, which is enough to ping her Kilgrave radar. They go home that evening to dig up the man’s address and decide to visit his house tomorrow, as soon as possible.

Jessica also thinks about using the alethiometer, but hesitates. Her first instinct is to ask it where Kilgrave is hiding, but tracking him down won’t do any good until she’s come up with a plan to subdue him first—a plan which she currently doesn’t have. 

It’s possible the alethiometer could tell her something about his weaknesses, but the problem is that Jessica doesn’t have anything solid enough to help her frame the question yet. And the broader and more vague her starting inqury, the harder it will be to interpret the answer. Asking “What is Kilgrave’s weakness?” could give her almost any kind of response, up to and including his mild pollen allergies or fondness for white chocolate. Both technically weaknesses; neither particularly helpful at this time.

If Jessica had just had the guts to sit down and ask the alethiometer if Kilgrave really was dead all those months ago, after she got away, she could have saved herself all of this. But she’d been so sure—she’d seen his death certificate, for Christ’s sake. How the hell could anyone survive getting hit head-on by a speeding bus? The man was a fucking cockroach. 

Jessica shudders, feeling her pulse speeding up, the panic starting to bite at her chest—and takes a slow, deliberate breath. Cadmus brushes up against her leg, nipping lightly at her fingers as he does. 

“It’s okay,” she says, dragging the words out by sheer force of will. “I’m okay.” Cadmus regards her silently. “Let’s just—get back to work.”

Of course, it’s about then that her upstairs neighbors decide to start up on a whole new level of their usual banging and screaming routine—and whatever unspeakable, non-FDA-approved sex acts they’re getting up to, Jessica has just about had enough of the noise. 

So she storms upstairs to bang on their door and shout at them to keep the noise down, which leads to a bizarre confrontation with two freaky twenty-somethings—possibly twins? which, ew—neither of whom was apparently blessed with the good sense God gave a fucking goose. Ruben, the boy, has a slimy, bright yellow banana slug daemon that won’t stop staring at Cadmus the whole time, while Robyn, the girl, has an obnoxiously buzzing wasp daemon that’s a perfect match for her obnoxiously yapping voice. 

The sight of the two daemons doesn’t do much to endear the freaks to Jessica and Cadmus. Jessica knows it isn’t fair of her, but ever since Kilgrave, she’s been automatically suspicious of people with bug daemons. There’s just something creepy to her about invertebrates: how tiny they are, how they crawl around chittering on their breakable little insect legs—or even worse, how they fly, those quick, darting movements that make her flinch and Cadmus bare his teeth every time. There’s got to be something wrong with anyone whose soul would take a shape like that.

Narrow-minded prejudice, Trish would tell her if she could hear Jessica’s thoughts, and she’s probably right—but Trish isn’t here right now, and the creepy twins are. So, long story short, she’s not exactly diplomatic when she talks to them. 

“I don’t care what kind of shit you’re into,” Jessica snaps, after she loses her temper enough to slam the girl up against the wall. Her wasp daemon is buzzing in frantic, angry circles over Cadmus’s head, and Cadmus’s lips wrinkle back from his teeth as he growls in response. The boy and slug daemon just keep staring, as if stoned. Jessica kind of thinks he might just be like that, which is way worse. “Just do it quietly.”

“You’re a freak, lady,” the girl screams at her as she scrambles back inside, dragging her brother along behind her.

Jessica sneers after them. Maybe she’s got a point, but it’s still pretty rich, coming from the creepy redhead with the wasp daemon.

She and Cadmus sleep badly that night. They both keep startling awake, imagining they’ve heard sounds in the dark, soft tapping at the windows or behind the bedroom door. She dreams about Kilgrave crawling out from under the bed to join her beneath the covers, shirtless and smiling, whispering come here, Jessica into the shell of her ear, the words tickling damply as Laelaps buzzes overhead. She wakes up with a pounding headache and a scream on the tip of her tongue, and barely swallows it back in time. 

Murdock calls before she’s even managed to take the first sip of her bourbon-flavored coffee of the day. When the phone rings she jerks in surprise at the sound, spilling hot coffee onto Cadmus’s tail where he’s sitting at her feet, and Cadmus jumps up snarling at her.

“Shit—sorry, Cadmus—“ More coffee sloshes over the top of the cup as she drops it on her desk and reaches out for her coffee-stained daemon. “Fuck, lemme get a towel—“

“Answer the damn phone,” Cadmus growls, his temper clearly not improved by the loud, inistent ringing of the phone at her elbow in addition to his singed tail.

Jessica snarls wordlessly back at him, and answers the damn phone. 

“What,” she grits into the receiver. Cadmus gives himself a shake, sending coffee droplets flying across the room, and turns to lick at the brown stain his tail. 

“Good morning, Jessica,” Murdock says with absolutely disgusting good cheer. 

“Is it?” she mutters, and grimaces as she takes a sip of her too-hot coffee and instantly burns her tongue. Fuck, should have put more bourbon in it. “What do you want, Murdock?”

“Just calling to check in about the case. There were a couple potential strategies I wanted to run by you—“

“Can’t.” Ignoring her burnt tongue, Jessica takes another sip, closing her eyes as she tries to ignore the sick, hollow feeling of her stomach and the achey pressure building at her temples. “Not today. I’ve got a lead in the suburbs I need to check out.”

“Great,” Murdock says briskly, undiscouraged. “I’ll come with you. We can talk on the way.”

“What? No.” Too late, Jessica tries to kick her sluggish mind into gear. “This is actual PI work, Murdock. I don’t need you following me around, gettting in my way.”

“I promise to be discreet.”

Jessica scowled into the receiver. “I don’t care. And if this is just some ploy to elbow in on Kilgrave after I already told you no, then—“

“Jessica,” Murdock says, his voice obnoxiously reasonable, “Do you think there’s any chance that Kilgrave will be present at the home of whoever you’re visiting in the suburbs?”

Jessica scowls harder. “Well, no—“

“Then I don’t see how I could be elbowing in. You told me not to get within a hundred yards of him, and I’m not. I’m just asking to accompany you on a task for a case that we’re both working on—for free, I might add—“

“Ugh, whatever, you can come,” Jessica finally groans, rolling her eyes. “Just stop trying to debate me, Jesus, this isn’t law school.”

“Not so much,” Murdock agrees. “I’ll meet you at your office in twenty minutes.”

Adding insult to injury, he hangs up on Jessica before she can hang up on him. She glares silently at the phone instead, then takes a bigger gulp of her coffee. 

“You sure showed him,” Cadmus says from the floor.

“Shut up, Cadmus.”

But Jessica still gets up to grab a damp towel and help her daemon wipe the last of the bourbon-scented coffee from his tail. 

They’re both relatively clean and dressed by the time Murdock shows up. He’s wearing his dark glasses and a coat pulled over his suit, Philomena snuggled inside it with just her head peeking above the collar. He smiles one of his twitchy, reflexive smiles when Jessica opens the door at his knock, then pauses to sniff at the stink of alcohol already thick in the air. But he turns out to be smart enough not to comment on it, just sort of raises his brows and stands there leaning in the doorway, waiting for her. “Ready to go?”

Jessica shrugs into her leather jacket and wraps her scarf messily around her neck. “You’re the only thing holding me up, Murdock.”

He just keeps smiling at her. Murdock’s already gotten what he wanted, after all—she’s letting him tag along. “Great, let’s head out.” He actually has the nerve to hold the door open for her as she and Cadmus follow him out of the apartment. Jessica valiantly resists the urge to kick him in the shins when she walks past.

They take the metro. Murdock proves irritatingly good at not irritating her further, just makes some dumb Catholic joke about trains and leaves a comfortable few inches of space on the seats between them when they sit down. He’s also irritatingly helpful once they arrive at Jack Denton’s nightmarish house, distracting the mother in the kitchen while Jessica talks to Denton himself, or tries to, and finally snaps a picture of the make number on the dialysis machine. Cadmus spends the entire visit staring in horrified silence at Denton’s comatose badger daemon, open-eyed but motionless in his lap, too weak even to twitch her ears at their presence. 

She tries not to let on how shaken she is as they step outside, but as always, Murdock sees—or hears, or like, smells, or what-the-fuck-ever—more than she’d like.

“What happened in there?” he asks, as Philomena sticks her head further out of his coat to taste the air.

Cadmus brushes up against Jessica’s legs as she pulls her scarf more tightly around her neck. “Denton asked me to kill him,” she says at last, looking at the ground. The man’s scrawled handwriting on the note flashes in front of her eyes again: KILL ME. She suppresses a shiver.

Murdock hisses a little through his teeth, looking disturbed but not surprised. “So what’s your take? Did you get anything else out of him?”

“What, are you saying you couldn’t hear us through the walls or some shit like that?” Jessica’s still not really sure about the extent of Murdock’s abilities, but she figures if she keeps pushing he’ll eventually let more slip.

“I picked up on some of it,” he admits easily. “But I was more focused on keeping Mrs. Denton busy. Extending my hearing takes concentration, I have to really be listening.”

“God, you’re weird,” she mutters, and Murdock chuckles a little. 

“You’re the one who hired us,” Philomena says from his shoulder. At Jessica’s side, Cadmus yips in a way that sounds a lot like a laugh. 

“Shut up, Cadmus,” Jessica tells him automatically, but he just laughs again, the traitor. “Denton didn’t tell me anything, but I took a picture of the ID number on his dialysis machine. Someone must have set him up with it, and I’m guessing it wasn’t Kilgrave.” Kilgrave never spared so much as a second thought for any of the victims he left strewn in his wake; she couldn’t see him concerning himself with the fate of Denton one way or another. “I’m going to run it and see if it gets me any names.”

“Good idea.”

The praise makes her shrug uncomfortably. “Maybe. Did you notice anything, while we were there?”

Murdock shrugs in turn. “Nothing very useful. The mother’s a Baptist. Her husband died of a drinking problem several years ago, probably in response to substantial trauma he received as a child compounded by a lack of adult resources. Jack Denton’s definitely missing both his kidneys, and his daemon hasn’t moved from that spot on his lap in at least a week, maybe longer.” Jessica tries not to stare at him as he brings his hand up to scritch his daemon’s head. “Anything else, Mena?”

Philomena hums thoughtfully. “Mrs. Denton’s daemon bit her son’s sometime in the last twenty-four hours.”

“So, not the healthiest mother-son relationship,” Murdock concludes. 

“How do you pick up on this stuff?” Jessica finally has to ask. Curiosity was always her first sin, and this time it’s really killing her.

Murdock’s head tips her way, almost as if he’s glancing at her, though she knows his eyes are as sightless as ever behind those dark glasses. “Kidneys regulate salt and waste in the bloodstream,” he says, after a momentary pause. “Dialysis machines are less efficient, so I could smell the excess waste in the room, emanating from his skin.”

“And the husband?”

“Oh, Mrs. Denton more or less told me that part,” he says, mouth quirking up at the corners. “After inviting me to attend her Baptist congregation this Sunday at Trinity Church down the street.”

Oh. Jessica snorts and crosses her arms to hide her faint embarrassment; she should know better than to assume everything Murdock did was a magic trick. Just, like, one in three. “Nice detective work, Murdock.”

Now he just smirks at her. “I learned from the best.”

Ugh, whatever. 

Murdock goes over a few case details on the return trip. Jessica’s pretty sure it’s a conversation they could have had over the phone, but by now, there doesn’t seem to be much of a point in mentioning it. 

The Jack Denton visit at least leads her to one Dr. David Kurata, and it’s talking to him that gets Jessica the jackpot she’s been looking for: sufentanil. Kilgrave’s powers get shut off by sufentanil. Kurata was the surgeon Kilgrave forced to replace both his damaged kidneys with poor Jack Denton’s, the ambulance driver unlucky enough to be first on the scene at Kilgrave’s little accident. And Kilgrave had Kurata perform the surgery without anesthetic: specifically, without sufentanil. Because it would have left him vulnerable—it would have left Kurata free of his control.

“You know what this means?” Cadmus asks her quietly afterwards, his voice lilting up with an unfamiliar edge of hope.

“We’re going to nail the bastard.” Jessica can feel her lips twitching up into a grim smile. Her fingers tremble a little as she hits dial on her phone, and a few seconds later Murdock picks up.

“Jessica?” He sounds concerned.

“Matt,” she says, fast and urgent and almost gleeful. “I know how to take him down.” And then she tells him Kilgrave’s secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have finally dragged myself out of the pits of, you know, life the universe and etcetera to post this scrap of a chapter...as always, my policy on updates is that I unfortunately cannot and will not promise consistency, quality, or further chapters within a reasonable timespan. I wish I was a better woman, but alas. Enjoy?
> 
> Anyway thank you to all of my very generous and kind readers who take the time to comment and leave kudos, you are far superior human beings than I, and I really do read all of them and feel very grateful and touched that any of you took the time. My life is very chaotic and sad right now and I simply do not have it in me to reply the way I want to. Someday things will be okay again! In the meantime, we live in fantasy, as Marcus Aurelius did not write. 
> 
> I love that I seem to be accidentally introducing what I can only assume is a contingent of very loyal Matt/Jess shippers to the HDM universe, which I had thought was super well-known but is apparently far more niche than I realized - you are all troopers for getting this far, I salute you and welcome you to my bizarre cross-over interests. Not sure about a Matt POV chapter but I will think on it. Adieu!


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